Progress and its Discontents [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520313545

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Progress AND

ITS

Discontents

Progress AND

ITS

Discontents E D I T E D BY G A B R I E L A. A L M O N D , MARVIN CHODOROW, & ROY H A R V E Y PEARCE Sponsored by the Western Center of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Berkeley Los Angeles London U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A

PRESS

"The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion" by Daniel Bell © 1977 by Daniel Bell. "The Costs of Utopia" by Robert C. Elliott reprinted from Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 152 (1976), ed. Theodore Besterman, by permission of the Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, Oxford. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1982 by The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Progress and its discontents. Papers based on a conference held in Palo Alto, Calif., Feb., 1979. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Progress—Congresses. 1. Almond, Gabriel Abraham, 1911II. Chodorow, Marvin. III. Pearce, Roy Harvey. IV. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Western Center. HM101.P89 303.4 81-11643 ISBN 0-520-04478-9 AACR2

CONTENTS F o r e w o r d JOEL COLTON

ix

Preface xiii Introduction

GABRIEL A. ALMOND, MARVIN CHODOROW, AND ROY HARVEY PEARCE 1 PART I

Historical, Ideological, and Evolutionary Aspects

17

NANNERL O. KEOHANE

1. The Enlightenment Idea of Progress Revisited

21

GEORG G. IGGERS

2. The Idea of Progress in Historiography and Social Thought Since the Enlightenment 41 ALFRED G. MEYER

3. The Idea of Progress in Communist Ideology

67

CRAWFORD YOUNG

4. Ideas of Progress in the Third World

83

FRANCISCO J. AY ALA

5. The Evolutionary Concept of Progress

106

PART II

The Progress and Problems of Science

125

JOHN T. EDSALL

6. Progress in Our Understanding of Biology

135

GERALD FEINBERG

7. Progress in Physics: The Game of Intellectual Leapfrog BERNARD D. DAVIS

8. Fear of Progress in Biology

182

GERALD HOLTON

9. Toward a Theory of Scientific Progress MARC J. ROBERTS

10. Progress in Social Science

226 V

202

161

VI

CONTENTS

H. STUART HUGHES

11. Contemporary Historiography: Progress, Paradigms, and the Regression Toward Positivism 240 PART III

The Prospects and Problems of Material Progress

249

MOSES ABRAMOVITZ

12. The Retreat from Economic Advance: Changing Ideas About Economic Progress

253

HARVEY BROOKS

13. Can Technology Assure Unending Material Progress?

281

NATHAN ROSENBERG

14. Natural Resource Limits and the Future of Economic Progress

301

HOLLIS B. CHENERY

15. Poverty and Progress

319

PART I V

Political and Social Aspects

333

GIANFRANCO POGGI

16. The Modern State and the Idea of Progress

337

AARON WILDAVSKY

17. Progress and Public Policy

361

G. BINGHAM POWELL, JR.

18. Social Progress and Liberal Democracy

375

SAMUEL H. BARNES

19. Changing Popular Attitudes Toward Progress

403

PART V

Progress and Humanistic Understanding

427

STEVEN MARCUS

20. Conceptions of the Self in an Age of Progress

431

MURRAY KRIEGER

21. The Arts and the Idea of Progress

449

ROBERT C. ELLIOTT

22. The Costs of Utopia

470

MARTIN E. MARTY

23- The Idea of Progress in Twentieth-Century Theology DANIEL BELL

24. The Return of the Sacred: The Argument About the Future of Religion

501

482

CONTENTS

FREDERICK A. OLAFSON

25. The Idea of Progress: An Ethical Appraisal Contributors Index 551

547

FOREWORD W h a t has happened in our day to the idea of progress—the belief in the continuing improvement of the human condition? To contemporary ears it has a hollow ring. Yet for two centuries, f r o m the eighteenth to the early twentieth, the belief in progress was an important credo in the West in both intellectual and popular circles, and it accompanied many of the formidable accomplishments of Western civilization. For many it became a surrogate religion, a secular faith: Progress, spelled upper case, replaced Providence. W i t h the continuing accumulation of theoretical and practical knowledge, there seemed to be no barriers to realizing on this earth the deepest human aspirations. Civilization had advanced from the earliest stages of precivilization, was advancing, and would continue to advance in the foreseeable future. Men and women would move forward to ever-increasing material comfort and happiness. A golden future stretched ahead. Flexibly interpreted, the idea of continuing progress can be traced back to classical and medieval times and can be said to have a 2,500— not a 250—year-old ancestry. But it is more common, and perhaps more convincing, to conceive of it as a modern idea, born with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and with the popularization of science, rationalism, secularism, and scientific thinking in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Nineteenth-century evolutionary ideas reinforced it. In that same century, a number of deterministic philosophies, Marxism being the most influential and lasting, asked us to interpret progress as inevitable, as the result of impersonal historical forces; human intervention could accelerate or slow the process but not prevent it. Others in the same century, like J o h n Stuart Mill, building on the thought of the Enlightenment philosophers, saw progress as contingent upon h u m a n intelligence and human will; denying inevitability, they left a large margin for h u m a n rationality and choice. To be sure, there were intellectuals throughout these years who questioned the belief in continuing progress and were less optimistic about human destiny, but no one denied its pervasiveness. N o matter what the differences among its proponents, this tenaciously held idea meant, in its simplest form, that each generation could look forward to a IX

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richer, happier, fuller, and more peaceful life for itself and its posterity. The very notion reinforced the self-confidence and dynamism of Western civilization as Western influence spread throughout the world. What then happened to the idea of progress as a popular and intellectual belief so that today it has fallen into disrepute? No contemporary would hold the buoyant view of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" written in 1842: For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be, Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dripping down with costly bales, Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled, In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world. Today, no contemporary possesses the enthusiasm or optimism of the New York World on January 1, 1901, the opening day of the twentieth century: "The World is optimistic enough to believe that the twentieth century . . . will meet and overcome all perils and prove to be the best this steadily improving planet has ever seen." The first powerful shock came in 1914 when the "civilized" nations of Europe—most of them boasting the advances of science and technology, education, and self-government—went to war with one another and quickly brought even non-European nations into the vortex of a global conflict. The world had scarcely recovered from the conflagration when other traumas followed: the Russian Revolution, fought, like the French Revolution, in the name of heroic ideals but demanding from its inception to the present unconscionable human sacrifices; fascism in its Italian and in its generic form; the Great Depression; Nazism, reaching its climax of bestiality in the scientifically organized wartime extermination camps of the Third Reich; the carnage of the Second World War; the war's aftermath of spreading dictatorship and new armed conflicts; and the aborted hopes for democracy and economic advance in the emergent Third World countries. Indeed, the idea of continuing progress received staggering blows in the twentieth century. To be sure, science and technology continued to move forward with accomplishments exceeding the anticipations of even their boldest prophets. The greatest invention of the nineteenth century, Alfred North Whitehead had once observed, was "the invention of the method of invention" (Science and the Modern World, New York, 1925). The harnessing of nuclear energy was one such "invention" in the twentieth century, the Second World War ending with the explosion of the atomic bomb as an awesome portent for the future. In the postwar years the frightening thought spread that for the first time in history

FOREWORD

XI

universal planetary destruction was a real possibility. With no adequate international controls and with nuclear proliferation, the atomic clock ticked on. No one in the heyday of the idea of progress had to cope with any such lengthening shadow. Meanwhile people in the mid-twentieth century also took note, as never before, of the baneful effects of unrestrained technological growth—the pollution of the atmosphere, the spoliation and exhaustion of natural resources, the depersonalization of the workplace. The world economy itself did not seem rational or controllable. The essential element in the idea of progress—belief in improved lives for oneself, one's children, and one s children's children—was incalculably undermined. Faith in the idea of progress plummeted from the heights. Future historians will probably record that from the mid-twentieth century on, it was difficult for anyone to retain faith in the idea of inevitable and continuing progress. People increasingly now use the word in quotation marks or with mocking sarcasm or speak not of progress in civilization but in barbarism. As Western dominance and self-confidence wane, so too does the idea of progress. Is the idea of progress, as we once knew it, to be abandoned completely? No one can deny continuing scientific advances, spectacular discoveries in biochemistry, genetics, and physics, the knowledge explosion, the growth in informational technology, the achievements of medicine and surgery, space exploration, and increased human longevity. Building on the past, we are still in so many ways moving forward and can continue to progress. But the critical unresolved question is whether we can control human and social affairs—prevent a nuclear holocaust, preserve international peace, provide social and economic justice, master the economy, protect natural resources, cope with global overpopulation, assist in overcoming famine and pestilence, and preserve the quality of life as well as prolong life. We are not so sure. Much has happened to destroy the pristine appeal of the belief in progress. Yet has it all turned to ashes? Without some faith in the future—in progress—we lose a precious element of our heritage and lose self-confidence itself. We know that we cannot turn back nor lock up atomic or genetic secrets. But we can retain the will to understand the implications of modern science and technology and remain the masters and not the servants of our scientific and technological civilization, now no longer Western but worldwide. If we have abandoned formulas of inevitable and automatic progress or of Utopian perfection, we can still, through human will and intelligence, make slow and steady advances and cope with the dangers of which we are aware. Chastened by history, we must cut our hopes and dreams down to size, heeding perhaps the words of John Dewey, who once noted of "progress": "It is not a wholesale matter, but a retail job, to be contracted for and executed in sections" (Characters and Events, New York, 1929).

FOREWORD

XII

The older belief in progress need not be abandoned but transformed and circumscribed; too much is at stake for us to drop it completely. Robert Nisbet, a recent historian of the idea of progress and often a critic of the idea itself, pointedly reminds us: "If the idea of progress does die in the West, so will a great deal else that we have long cherished in our civilization" (History of the Idea of Progress, New York, 1980). The distinguished contributors to this volume help us in richly diverse ways to see more clearly the transformation of the idea of progress in our day and its contemporary meaning in the present decade of the twentieth century, both in the Western and the much larger non-Western world, in capitalist and in Marxist-oriented societies, in the many fields of knowledge itself, and in intellectual and general belief. No one who reads these pages can fail to appreciate the importance of the idea of progress in history or the need to reexamine its meaning in our own era thoughtfully and critically through the multifaceted prisms that these thinkers provide. We lament the deaths, within two months of eath other in 1979, of two men who were deeply involved in the study of the idea of progress. One was John H. Knowles, physician and humanist, who, in his own field of medicine, lamented the advance of technology—"progress"— as interfering with the true mission of the physician-healer to treat the individual whole person. As president of the Rockefeller Foundation, he encouraged this collaborative project. The second was Charles Frankel, philosopher-humanist and respected scholar, who presided brilliantly over the newly established National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Concerned professionally with the idea of progress ever since writing his doctoral dissertation, The Faith of Reason: The Idea of Progress in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1948), he argued eloquently in The Case for Modern Man (New York, 1955) and elsewhere that the idea of progress was not necessarily a hubristic challenge to the gods, a belief insensitive to human imperfection and frailty, or a substitute religion; that belief in predetermined, inevitable, and automatic progress obstructed true progress; and that only through human intelligence, will, and action could we salvage something of the older idea of progress and hope to bequeath to future generations the genuine advances of civilized thought and accomplishments—not least, freedom and the toleration of different viewpoints that make continuing advance possible. JOEL COLTON Director for

Humanities

The Rockefeller 1974-1981

Foundation

PREFACE Plans for this book were first laid in the early 1970s when the utopianism and apocalyptic mood of the counterculture were still running strong. T h e Western Center of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences had just been established, and its founding committee often discussed the cultural-historical significance of these developments. It held an exploratory conference on what it decided to call the "transformation of the idea of progress" in San Diego, California, in February 1977. T h e preliminary conference helped us discriminate the various components of the idea, ideologies, and culture of progress, and on this basis we organized a second conference in Palo Alto in February 1979, at which outlines dealing with the various topics in this book were presented and discussed. T h e essays published in this book are largely those presented in provisional form at that conference. An interdisciplinary cultural-historical inquiry, as this volume is, must, of necessity, be a collaborative effort. Its editors include a physicist, a social scientist, and a literary historian and critic. Its authors include historians of ideas and of science, philosophers and theologians, biologists, physicists, engineers, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and students of literature and the arts. It has been carried on under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences founded just two centuries ago by one of the leading spokesmen of the Enlightenment and one of the principal interpreters of the idea of progress, John Adams. T h e kinds of questions we raise in this book require this multidimensional exploration, and it is fitting that they be explored under these auspices at the beginning of the Academy's third century. At various stages of this enterprise the editors have received advice, help, and support from many individuals. John Voss and Alexandra Oleson of the Academy office in Boston took an active and supportive interest in the project from the very beginning and made important substantive and editorial contributions. Joel Colton, former Director for the Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, played an active role in planning the conference and the book. Paul Robinson of the Stanford History Department gave us much helpful advice in the early stages of xin

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PREFACE

the project. Muriel Bell of the Western Center of the Academy organized the Palo Alto conference and followed up on the preparation and submission of papers. Estelle Jelinek did a thorough and imaginative job of editing the papers and advising on the overall construction of the volume. William McClung, Marilyn Schwartz, and Mary Lamprech of the University of California Press guided the manuscript thoughtfully and helpfully through the deliberative, editorial, and production processes. W e want to thank the anonymous readers of the University of California Press for their many helpful suggestions and the many colleagues who took the trouble to read and comment on individual manuscripts. W e are grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for their interest in and support of this project. GABRIEL A . ALMOND MARVIN CHODOROW R O Y HARVEY PEARCE

INTRODUCTION This collection of essays attempts to take our cultural-historical bearings after almost two decades of disquiet, doubt, and disturbance. T h e questions that have been raised go to the heart of modern culture, the culture of progress. Processes, institutions, and values which have been taken for granted for two centuries have been brought into question. Are science and technology really "progressive" and beneficial in their consequences? Have they led to the enhancement of welfare, greater happiness, and moral improvement? Is the continued growth of material productivity possible? Is it desirable? Are the institutions of progress viable and beneficial: public bureaucracies, business corporations, universities, research centers, political parties, interest groups, and the mass media? T h e questioning has been comprehensive, penetrating, and corrosive. W e can speak of a crisis of modern culture without fear of exaggeration. THE IDEA OF PROGRESS AS PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Unlike the terms "modernization" and "development," which are used by sociologists and economists to refer to the increase and spread of the institutions, products, and services of modern civilization, "progress" is the name that our historical era of the last two or three centuries has bestowed upon itself. It is the real "name" of a selfconscious historical era, a term full of diffuse connotations and ambiguities. The changes to which it refers are not only changes of a certain sort, but they are changes presumed to be for the better. It represents a cultural self-identification, an assertion of a historical identity. When we speak in this book of the idea of progress, of ideologies of progress, and of the culture of progress, we are referring to different aspects, manifestations, and versions of a historic culture. And when we talk about the discontent with and the transformation of these ideas and ideologies and of this culture, we are probing into the depths of our contemporary experience, in an effort to anticipate how this culture may be changing and what form these changes may be taking. Though parts and aspects of the idea of progress had been adum1

2

INTRODUCTION

brated earlier, it only began to take on fully elaborated form as a set of interconnected ideas and expectations in the decades after the mideighteenth century. At the beginning of this period—between 17511772—the thirty-two volumes of Diderot's Encyclopedia appeared in Paris, including contributions by a galaxy of eighteenth-century philosophies—Buffon, D'Alembert, Holbach, Montesquieu, Quesnai, Voltaire, and many others. Its articles affirmed the belief that through knowledge man could learn to control nature and make it serve his purposes, increase his material welfare, improve his institutions, reform his legislation, perfect his aesthetic tastes and moral standards, and cultivate the satisfactions of industry and peace. In the succeeding decades Europe and the United States produced a succession of philosophical expositors of the doctrine of progress, including Turgot, Adam Smith, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Kant, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Comte, John Stuart Mill, and many others. By the second half of the nineteenth century a number of different versions of the idea of progress had emerged. The most distinctive were those elaborated by Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx, the first theory an individualist and evolutionary interpretation, the second collectivist and revolutionary. The distinctiveness of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idea of progress is suggested when we compare it with earlier philosophical-historical formulations. Philosophies of history tend to take positions on five questions: (1) the direction of the historical process, whether progressive, regressive, linear, curvilinear, or cyclical; (2) the rate of historical change, whether incremental or characterized by quantum transformations; (3) the agent (or agents) of historical change, whether it (or they) is (are) a divine force (or forces) controlling history or a divine plan instituted at the beginning and then working itself out in history, as in the idea of Providence; or whether the agent is human reason and effort; or whether the divine and human together operate in some ratio or combination; (4) the substance of historical change, that is, the areas of historical transformation and their interaction, as knowledge, crafts, and arts, material growth and welfare, political institutions and ideas, and moral and spiritual values, and how they are all linked together; and (5) the identity of the bearers of history, whether they be Greeks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, or some larger identity as civilized man or all humanity. Earlier philosophies of history had complex views of historical directionality, positing both regression from a golden age as well as progress, presenting a realm of nonhistorical being as well as one of becoming, as in Plato. In the various Christian versions of history, though historical improvements may be celebrated as in Augustine, there is no getting around original sin and the fall of man, and redemption and salvation as the larger metaphysical frame within which historic time is enclosed. And certainly among Christian theologians the agent of historical change is divine, with humanity fulfilling divine

INTRODUCTION

3

purposes. Knowledge and the material arts, while important, take second place to divine purpose and the world of the spirit. T h e idea of progress as it developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was different from these earlier historical ideologies in all five of the above respects. First, its definition of direction is unequivocally progressive, though in its Hegelian and Marxian version a generally rising curve of progress contained within itself cyclical regressions. Second, historical growth proceeds at an incremental rate, though the liberal view, in some versions, posited a millenary endstate of perfection, and the Marxist view"alternated intervals of slow change with periods of rapid revolutionary change, to culminate in a state of perfection. Third, divine agency in the process of historical change is simply not posited or is only loosely and diffusely connected to human reason and will. Fourth, the various components of historical change—the arenas of history—are linked with knowledge as its catalyst, bringing improvement in the mechanic arts and the control of natural forces. These in turn bring about improvements in humanity's material and physical condition, which may make possible political emancipation and pacification. All of these related processes may enhance mankind's moral and aesthetic qualities and sensibilities. Finally, the historical actor in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century view is unequivocally all of humanity. It is this combination of properties which differentiates the modern idea of progress from the earlier view of history, particularly in its conception of man, the creator of knowledge, as the agent of progress; of knowledge as the catalytic force that brings about material, political, moral, and aesthetic improvement; and of all mankind as the ultimate actor and beneficiary in this process. THE EMERGING CULTURE OF PROGRESS

Unlike the earlier ideas of historical progress and improvement, the ideology of progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed, accompanied, and produced institutional, technical, and cultural changes of extraordinary scope and increasing momentum. Surely, by the second half of the nineteenth century the ideology of progress had become a historic culture, and self-consciously so. Not long after, or simultaneously with the publication of the works of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Marx and Engels, and Herbert Spencer—the leading ideologues of progress—the great urban industrial centers of the Western world began one after the other to present enormous displays of the conditions, the dynamics, and the products of progress to millions and tens of millions of people. T h e first great international exhibition took place in London in the Crystal Palace in 1851. Half a million persons attended it on opening day alone, and some six million visitors saw its exhibits before it closed. Prince Albert, the Royal Consort, patron of science, presided over the commission charged with organizing the exhibition. He de-

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INTRODUCTION

scribed the purpose and meaning of the exhibition in an early instruction to the organizers: Science discovers these laws of power, motion, and transformation: industry applies them to the raw matter, which the earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes valuable only by knowledge: art teaches us the immutable laws of beauty and symmetry, and gives to our productions forms in accordance with them. Gentlemen, THE EXHIBITION of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions. I confidently hope the first impression which the view of this vast collection will produce upon the spectator will be that of deep thankfulness to the Almighty for the blessings which He has bestowed upon us already here below; and the second, the conviction that they can only be realized in proportion to the help which we are prepared to render to each other—therefore, only by peace, love, and ready assistance, not only between individuals, but between the nations of the earth. 1 In rapid succession from the mid-century on, these great international expositions took place: Paris in 1855 with four million visitors, London again in 1862, Paris in 1867, Vienna in 1873, and the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876. The Parisian exhibition of 1878 attracted thirteen million visitors, and the later one of 1889 drew twenty-seven million visitors. The largest exhibition of the nineteenth century, the Columbian Exposition, took place in 1893 on the Midway in Chicago and celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. The nineteenth-century record for attendance was held by the Parisian Exposition of 1900, with thirty-nine million visitors. Walt Whitman composed a "Song of the Exposition" for the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, celebrating the triumph of industry, engineering, and technology and singing of how the wonders of the Old World paled in comparison: Mightier than Egypt's tombs, Fairer than Grecia's, Roma's temples, Prouder than Milan's statued, spired cathedral, More picturesque than Rhenish castle-keeps, We plan even now to raise, beyond them all, Thy great cathedral sacred industry, no tomb, A keep for life for practical invention....

1. Official Descriptive and Illustrated. Catalogue of the Great Exposition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, Vol. 1: 1851, Part I, Introductory (London: Spicer Bros., 1851), p. 4.

INTRODUCTION

5

Steam-power, the great express lines, gas, petroleum, These triumphs of our time, the Atlantic's delicate cable, The Pacific railroad, the Suez canal, the Mont Cenis and Gothard and Hoosac tunnels, the Brooklyn bridge, This earth all spann'd with iron rails, with lines of steamships threading every sea, Our own rondure, the current globe I bring. 2 T h e most powerful message conveyed by these enormous and selfconscious displays of the accomplishments of progress was the relation between science and material productivity. Other typical themes developed in exhibits at these great expositions were man's progress in the improvement of welfare, sanitation, and public health, and political development such as the formation of trade unions and the improvement of criminal justice and rehabilitation. T h e development of the fine arts also had a place in these exhibitions. But there was no doubt in these great cultural displays that science, education, technology, and material productivity held center stage. THE SYSTEM OF PROGRESS AND ITS PROBLEMATICS

T h e ideology of progress and the historic culture of progress in its liberal Western European-American version postulated and in part realized a set of interconnected changes of the sort shown in Figure 1. Fig. 1. T h e Logic of the Progress System Development and spread of science and knowledge

Technological innovation

Increase and spread of material welfare (food, shelter, clothing, health, leisure)

Development and spread of responsive and efficient organizations and institutions (large-scale industry and corporations, public bureaucracies, schools, universities and research centers, political parties, communications media, interest groups) + Intellectual, moral and aesthetic improvement and increasing human satisfaction 2. Walt Whitman, "Song of the Exposition," in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 145, 147-48.

6

INTRODUCTION

The development and spread of knowledge, science, and technology have increased material welfare, and these together have increased political participation and produced modern social, economic, and political organizations (even international ones). Similarly, the development of modern organizations has contributed to the growth and spread of knowledge, the growth of technology, and the increase in welfare. A case could be made for intellectual and moral improvements, and for some significant net increase in the sum and distribution of human satisfaction as well. Unless we argue that there has been no increase in human satisfaction (or a net decline) as a consequence of progress, any positive increment would have to be multiplied by the increase in longevity and human vitality. What we are suggesting is that the problematics of progress cannot be attributed to the failure of the "progress system." In some respects it has been an extraordinary success. But in recent decades, every relationship suggested in our diagram has come into question—the benignity of science and technology, the possibility and desirability of increased material welfare, the effectiveness of modern institutions and organizations, and the relation of the culture and structure of progress to human satisfaction and improvement. Does this questioning and rejection of progress reflect a genuine cultural-historical change, or is it a repetition of the doubts and alternative views of history that have always accompanied the Enlightenment idea of progress? Progress as ideology has never fully preempted the field of philosophy of history. A cyclical view of history—of ancient origins—that cultures and societies come into being and pass away has been expressed in modern times by such writers as Nietzsche, Spengler, Sorokin, and Toynbee. Even J. B. Bury, the first major explicator of the origins and content of the idea of progress, a man for whom the notion that progress somehow represented the ultimate stage of man's history on earth had strong attraction, drew back in the epilogue to his book The Idea of Progress and asked: "Does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain not very advanced stage of civilization; just as Providence, in its day, was an idea of relative value, corresponding to a stage somewhat less advanced?"3 More than forty years later Frank Manuel, at the conclusion of his study of the philosophy of history, found a consensus among the critics of "Progressism": "They are agreed that the next stage either must or is likely to entail a spiritualization of mankind and a movement away from the present absorption with power and instinctual existence." 4 3. J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 352. 4. Frank Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 159.

INTRODUCTION

7

More recently, in a book on the history of the idea of progress, Robert Nisbet advances the arresting proposition that "if there is one generalization that can be made confidently about the history of the idea of progress, it is that throughout its history the idea has been closely linked with, has depended upon, religion or upon intellectual constructs derived from religion." Nisbet argues that in recent decades as religious faith has declined and as even secular philosophical coherence has attenuated, faith in progress has declined. In other words, what lies behind the loss of our sense of positive direction is the disappearance of the core sacred beliefs, which, according to Nisbet, have always been at the "heart of any genuine culture." He goes on to argue that behind the fading of our confidence in the basic components of the idea of progress, "the death of the past, the displacement of Western pride of civilization, the waning faith in economic growth and in the works of reason[,] lies the moribundity of religious conviction, of belief in something greater than the life immediately around u s . . . . " Nisbet concludes his book on a tentative note of hope for a resurgence of faith in progress, based on what he views as the faint beginnings of a revival in religious belief. 5 In reviewing this litany of disillusionment with progress, we begin with the direct relationship, suggested in the above schema, among knowledge, science, and technology, and human satisfaction and improvement. There is little doubt that science and technology have been extraordinarily successful in increasing man's understanding and control over nature. But these triumphs have not been unambiguously constructive. They have at least two problematic aspects. First, in many cases a major breakthrough in science and technology produces a sense of uneasiness and threat among both producers and consumers—an urgent need for assessment and the exploration of consequences. Scientific and technological progress has increased man's power to manipulate physical and biological nature by many orders of magnitude, but accompanying it is some sense of helplessness, of powerlessness to keep this manipulative capacity constructive. Thus, from having been the catalysts of benign progress, science and technology have become morally ambiguous. There is a pervasive attitude that something has to be done to keep them from going bad. This attitude may in general be unjustified, but it is certainly true that the amount of intended and unintended evil science and technology are capable of, unless controlled, has increased enormously. Second, the great progress of science has, in Max Weber's words, dispelled the magic and mystery of the world, replacing it with rational5. Robert Nisbet, The History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 352, 354ff. For a penetrating discussion of the Nisbet thesis and an illuminating interpretation of the history of the idea of progress, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, "In Defense of Progress," Commentary, June 1980, pp. 53ff.

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INTRODUCTION

empirical views and procedures. Even the Newtonian cosmology provided a lawful, diffusely deistic setting consistent with and supportive of rational improvement. But modern cosmology, while it does not threaten a quick contraction and early repetition of the Big Bang, appears to have no connection at all to human culture and aspiration. The implications of the nature of the universe for human striving and aspiration seem ambiguous. The cosmos is seen to be neutral or indifferent; it does not really set the good Apollonian example it used to set in the days when the expectation of progress was green. Science erodes the older bases of moral legitimation and produces none of its own. Or if we turn to the development and spread of material welfare, it would appear to have become problematic in a number of respects. Though science and technology have proven their capacity to overcome material shortages in the past, they are now under pressure to achieve a much increased rate of innovation, one that would make possible continued growth in the advanced industrial world as well as a spread of the benefits of advanced industrial society to the rapidly growing population of the Third World. And assuming that these technical problems can be solved, there is substantial doubt that mankind's cultural adaptability and political capacity and will are sufficient to meet these grave challenges of growth and distribution on a global scale. 6 That complacency with respect to these problems is inappropriate is also suggested by our growing appreciation of the secondary consequences of technological progress—the threats to ecological balance, the costs, in health and natural beauty, of the various and still not fully understood forms of pollution, and the pressures of technology on the environment. Thus, progress in the sense of continued, increasingly generalized material welfare is said to be approaching limits, and it no longer seems plausible, as the liberal expectation of progress posited, that improvements in the welfare of poor people and poor countries can be derived from increased growth and productivity and from redistributive measures that stop short of reducing the share of material welfare going to the rich. Sharply redistributive politics is a component of the Marxist expectation of progress, not the liberal expectation. But the problematics of material welfare go deeper than this if we follow the arguments of some economists. On the one hand, it is asserted that the standardized material products "progress" has produced fail to meet and in some sense preempt human needs for stimulation, variety, and novelty. And, on the other, it is argued that the routinization of activity and confinement of increasing numbers of human beings in large urban agglomerations characteristic of the 6. For a thoughtful projection of the limits in growth in the Third World, see Nathan Keyfitz, "World Resources and the World Middle Class," Scientific American, July 1976, pp. 28ff.

INTRODUCTION

9

modern economy is too high a price to pay for a productivity that seems in part to be of dubious value. T h e spread of knowledge, science, and technology and of material welfare has both contributed to and been furthered by the development of modern organizations—political parties, organized interest groups, governmental bureaucracies, corporations, schools and universities, and the mass media of communication. Political parties and organized interest groups have been the instrumentalities that created modern mass representative democracy, made public office generally accessible, democratized and "meritocratized" educational opportunity, and introduced the welfare state. Governmental bureaucracies now preempt between one-third to one-half of the national product of advanced liberal societies for the provision of public goods, such as security, public order, and recreation, and for the redistribution of access to material goods and services. T h e modern corporation has been the organized instrument that has made possible the enormous increase in the production and distribution of modern goods and services. T h e university has served as the major center of scientific discovery, as one of the major centers of technological development, and increasingly as a meritocratic screening device in the recruitment of individuals into desired social positions. The mass media of communication have become major disseminators of knowledge and information and creators of tastes and values. Each one of these organizations and agencies has become a crucial component of the reality of progress, and each one has developed its own problematics. Political parties are increasingly losing their steady clienteles and, consequently, their capacity for aggregating and organizing popular demand. The representative, pluralist politics of liberalism have to some extent become supplanted by populist and confrontation politics and by media and public relations politics. Modern interest groups have to some extent converted representative democracies into congeries of syndicalist monopolies and single-issue "lobbies," many of which have the capacity to bring vital social and governmental functions to a halt. The older system of interest-group pluralism has been attenuated by the emergence of the shop floor revolt and the flash strike as a principal means of special interest pressure. Thus, the organizations which have previously made for a certain order and reconciliation of demand consistent with responsive and effective public policy and implementation are no longer able to perform these functions effectively. Governmental bureaucracy, having been the instrument for the provision of security, public order, equality of opportunity, and minimal standards of welfare, is alleged to have become an impersonal and voracious monster, governed by Parkinsonian laws of growth, its various departments and bureaus pursuing technocratic and bureaucratic

INTRODUCTION

10

values, its parts interminable, the "administrative slice" everincreasing at the expense of the service slice. Thus, there is substantial disillusionment with the political system of advanced liberal society in both its input and its output aspects. And yet it is being called upon to cope with and solve problems of an increasingly urgent and intractable kind. It is not surprising that one of the major themes of modern political analysis is the "ungovernability" of modern society. The modern business corporation is viewed as corruptive of politics and government, inaccessible to governmental control, exploitative of the economies of poor countries, wasteful of scarce resources, indifferent to environmental values, and a major cause of deterioration of taste and moral values. The modern university is criticized for producing narrow specialists and technical virtuosi, for failing to transmit historical culture effectively, and for losing sight of its charactershaping function. And the mass media of communication are variously under attack for sensationalizing information, disrupting orderly and prudent political and policy processes, and brutalizing and vulgarizing taste and moral standards. Thus, modern organizations have produced cognitive-technicalmaterial progress, but they are said to have also brought about a precarious and threatening state of the world. The notion of progress in its liberal version has implied a benign, almost automatic process. Morality was assumed to be an outcome of material improvement and secular knowledge whereas politics and collective coercion had minimal rule-keeping and security concerns or were called upon for intermittent remedial interventions. Otherwise, an invisible hand converted self-interest into collective interest or transformed the short-run view of interest into the long-term view. THEMES OF THIS BOOK

Progress and Its Discontents is divided into five parts. The first part deals with progress as a historical, ideological, and evolutionary concept. The second part appraises science and knowledge from the two perspectives of the prospects for their continued growth and the problem of the side effects and negative consequences of that growth. Part Three deals with the prospects and problematics of continued economic and technical progress. Part Four explores the political and sociological aspects of progress; and Part Five relates the idea of progress to the realms of the arts, morality, and religion. A multiauthored book of this kind cannot aspire to an unambiguous and definite set of conclusions. There are differences in philosophy and emphasis among the authors, which become clear in the individual chapters. Nevertheless, the following themes are advanced in the course of the book.

INTRODUCTION

11

1. The Enlightenment polemic about the necessary linkages among the various spheres of science and knowledge, material productivity, political, economic, and social institutions, human welfare, morality, and aesthetic creativity is clearly resolved in favor of such skeptics as Voltaire and Diderot. There are undoubtedly strong connections between increasing knowledge and technical innovation and material productivity, but the linkages of these with political and moral improvement are surely not unambiguously positive, as was predicted by Turgot and Condorcet. At the same time, given the dominance of the planet by the ideas, ideologies, and cultures of progress and the enormous and problematic powers which have been let loose, the linkage of political and moral progress with the other components cannot simply be left as an open question. If the notion of an "inevitable" and benign sequence of the components of progress has been set aside, the question may now be raised about whether the culture of progress can survive without making moral and political "progress" of the most fundamental sort. 2. The powerhouse of progress has always been the growth of knowledge, and the pattern which this growth has been held to take has been one of cumulativeness. This model of scientific growth has come under attack and the argument advanced that the notion of cumulativeness be replaced by a more political and dialectical model of scientific progress. This view, by and large, has not been adopted by philosophers and historians of science and, certainly, not by scientists themselves. How science grows is now the subject of a separate historical discipline, and the model which seems to be emerging is one of considerably greater complexity than the classical view, but one in which cumulativeness and progress survive. 3. Although progress, in the sense of cumulativeness, and unification characterize the physical and biological sciences, for the social and historical disciplines progress has an overlapping but differing set of meanings. There have been great achievements in our understanding of economic, social, political, and cultural processes and their interdependences. This increased understanding has been attained in part through the use of scientific procedures of rigorous measurement, experiment, statistical analysis, and mathematical modeling. But in at least two respects progress in the social and historical disciplines differs from the "hard science" model. First, their data—human interactions, behaviors, and aspirations—are not and cannot be standardized. Memory, learning, and invention render them unstable; hence, regularities may decay, and psychological, social, cultural, and economic "laws" may lose their force. Second, efforts to explain culture, social structure, politics, and economics by a reductionist strategy imitative of the successes of the hard sciences in reducing biological processes to chemical and physical ones have turned out to be an

12

INTRODUCTION

over-sanguine and inappropriate agenda. The serious consequences of the misinterpretation of the nature of the social and historical sciences are most evident in this context of the general treatment of the theme of human progress and its problematics. It is plain that human survival—to say nothing of the continued spread of welfare— will turn on our capacity to resist and overcome "normal," "lawlike" social, cultural, and political propensities and constraints, and to invent and achieve historically unprecedented outcomes. 4. Though the more optimistic Enlightenment philosophers included the arts in their idea of progress, it is evident that the idea of progress is applicable to the arts in limited ways. We cannot argue that modern art objects are more beautiful than ancient ones, that the novels of Tolstoy are more beautiful than the epics of Homer. There is, however, progress in the arts in the sense of the encouragement and fostering of artistic talent, in the display and accessibility of art objects to larger audiences, in the appreciation and interpretation of art objects, and in the enrichment of artistic techniques from the influences of science and technology. 5. The development of mankind has reached a stage at which our problems and their solutions are dominated by science and technology. The same science and technology which produce what first seemed to be a beneficial drug also discover the harmful side effects and alternatives which mitigate the side effects. The threat of nuclear destruction and of environmental deterioration brought about by the progress of science and technology has produced an "adversary culture" and a "critical establishment." The adversary culture is a mood of distrust of and resistance to scientific and technological growth among a substantial part of the educated populations of advanced industrial nations; and the critical establishment consists of a collection of interest groups and lobbies which influence public opinion and public policy as they affect scientific activity and technology. This political dialectic has positive consequences, bringing other important values to bear on technological development and economic growth. But the adversary culture and the critical establishment do not fully appreciate the urgency of technological adaptiveness. If the conflict among growth, safety, and aesthetics is always resolved against growth and risk, the creative potential of science and technology, of which we have the most urgent need, may be seriously impaired. 6. The achievement of economic growth in Europe and America in the nineteenth century was accompanied by increasing inequality as modern economic sectors emerged out of primarily agricultural economies. The peoples of contemporary Third World countries seem to be less tolerant of this pattern of economic progress. Material progress in the contemporary world tends to be defined politically as requiring a more equitable balance of growth and distribution. This has begun to reduce confidence in the measures of economic growth. Simple per

INTRODUCTION

13

capita growth of the national product fails to reflect the distribution of income among various groups in the society. In the more advanced economies confidence in the present pattern of economic measurement has been impaired by our failure to take into account the externalities of economic growth—the costs in health, amenities, and safety resulting from economic progress. Thus, in general, we can say that a skeptical and more prudent mood has replaced the optimism of the earlier stages of the culture of progress and that the future evaluation of material progress will insist on a reconciliation of these secondary consequences and on an accommodation with considerations of equity. 7. The relation of government to progress is more complex and problematic. From having become the primary instrument of welfare and equity in the last century, government in advanced liberal societies now seems to be encountering intractable problems of economic growth, stability, and equity whereas in the communist world massive government represses liberty and privacy and seems to be encountering its own set of growth and distributive problems. From different starting points, these two sharply contrasting approaches to government are seeking to reconcile growth, stability, equity, and liberty in different ratios and proportions. It is in the area of international politics that the relation of the state to progress becomes most problematic. The growth of defense expenditures and the concentration of science and technology on the development of increasingly destructive weapons are the very opposite of progress, and it is this development and use of science and technology that have most seriously impaired our faith in a "progressive" future. Surely, in this area progress is to be measured by the establishment of effective controls over armaments and the establishment of limits on the policies of governments that may result in their use. 8. Although democracy continues to perform well by comparison with other alternatives in the advanced industrial societies, it would appear to be less effective in societies seeking to cope with the massive problems of modernization. In the Third World the place of democracy in the overall strategy of progress is still not fully understood. At least at certain points in this process of modernization, technocratic authoritarian regimes seem to produce better results. 9. The growth and diffusion of scientific knowledge have meant the increasing displacement of theocentric and anthropocentric views of the universe and nature. The cosmology of science has replaced these traditional beliefs with the view that the physical universe as now constituted, the emergence of living organisms, and the emergence of man and of his contemporary culture were none of them necessary and inevitable and that their future in the long run is in doubt. Surely, the intellectual impact of the scientific revolution is destructive of traditional culture and of religiously based systems of morality. These

14

INTRODUCTION

secularizing and demystifying influences have been met in the past and even today by defensive and repressive measures on the part of powerful groups and agencies in society. But this demoralization and alienation may perhaps be only the first generation of reactions to the spread of the culture of science. The view that secularization replaces the sacred is only tenable if one confines the notion of the sacred to traditional definitions. The great discoveries of modern science produce their own humility, awe, and mystery. If anything, the imputation of sacredness to the environment and to the preservation of the species has been enhanced in recent decades. The awareness of the contingent basis of man's emergence and existence may prove to be more supportive of a sober, consequential morality than of nihilism or a mock-heroic existentialism. 10. Although science and the growth of knowledge have eroded traditional morality, they have opened the potentiality of a far-reaching science and technology-based morality. The sense of obligation and responsibility seems to stretch and extend as far and as deep as we can know and understand. Contemporary humankind is asked to assume a responsibility as extensive and as compelling as the sweep and power of modern knowledge. Our obligation to help the poor is not confined to alms but calibrated by criteria of nutrition and indexed for inflation. Our obligation to heal the sick and cure and prevent disease has kept pace with modern medical technology, radically transformed the ratio of births to deaths, increased longevity, and produced secondary and unintended consequences of the gravest and most complex kind. We cannot argue that there has been a decline in morality as a consequence of modern science and technology. Rather it would appear that we evaluate ourselves and our performance by more and more demanding criteria and hence seem to be falling short of what we require of ourselves. Our charity is less visible since it has become routinized and bureaucratized and rationalized as tax saving. Our regard for human dignity has produced a whole series of affirmative actions relating to race, sex, age, cultures and lifestyles, such that it has now become almost taboo to investigate and assert the existence of differences. But this science and technology-based sense of moral obligation is specialized and fragmented. Its very success is based upon this specialization. What we have begun to appreciate is that when our humanity is broken up into parts—health, aesthetic sensibility, safety, dignity, privacy—these parts do not add up to a whole identity. The caring for and the cure of souls—once the province of a vital and powerful religious establishment—is now left to psychotherapy and mental health programs. Thus, the fostering of morality by progress is a story of extraordinary accomplishment in detail, at the cost of a fragmentation of the sense of self and of community.

INTRODUCTION

15

What gives a desperate quality to the modern ethical dilemma is not only that we evaluate ourselves by more exacting criteria but that we seem to have no choice but to stretch and reach them. Thus, the control of nuclear technology can hardly appear as a matter of ethical free choice. The burden of population and technology on environment produces a similar sense of urgency. T h e growing gap between the developed and developing worlds has similarly threatening overtones. If there is a single phrase that can capture the contemporary version of the idea of progress, it would be progress not as an inevitable sequence of improvements but as aspiration and compelling obligation.

PART

I

Historical, Ideological, and Evolutionary Aspects

Part One traces the idea of progress through its intellectual history, its ideological transformations, and its diffusion as idea and ideology throughout the entire world. The concluding essay of Part I is concerned with the biological-evolutionary basis of the idea of progress. In the opening essay dealing with the origins of the idea of progress, Nannerl Keohane points out that in the eighteenth century, humanity's autonomous creative and adaptive potential is recognized and legitimated for the first time on a substantial scale. To be sure, she points out that not all the philosophers of the eighteenth century share the "simplistic optimism" of the Abbé Saint-Pierre, Turgot, and Condorcet, that knowledge and the progress of reason will solve all humankind's problems. There were skeptics such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Kant, who argued that increasing knowledge and technical development did not necessarily produce political and moral improvement. What did take place in the eighteenth century was a general recognition that new powers were afoot in the world, that through knowledge man was in a position to acquire mastery over nature, but with what political and moral consequences was a matter of debate. Georg Iggers traces the idea of progress through the social theory and historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He describes three approaches to history which carry through from the Enlightenment to modern times. The first of these is the unambiguously progressive approach represented in the eighteenth century by the work of Adam Ferguson, Saint-Pierre, Turgot, and Condorcet. In 17

18

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I

the nineteenth century Hegel, Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx, and Spencer follow in this same tradition, emphasizing the universality of history and dividing it into progressive stages; however, these nineteenthcentury social theorists gave more emphasis to historical and collective tendencies and constraints and to conflict as a progressive dynamic, along with the growth of knowledge and the progress of reason. In the contemporary era this progressive tradition is represented in the "stages" of development studies of Walt Rostow and Cyril Black and in the modernization theories of Talcott Parsons, Neil Smelser, and others. The second approach emphasizes the ambiguity of progress, the costs, and negative side effects. In the nineteenth century this tradition of skepticism and pessimism about the value of progress is expressed in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, who stresses the negative consequences of increasing equality; Ferdinand Tônnies, the destruction of community; Emile Durkheim, man's alienation as a consequence of division of labor and specialization; and Max Weber, the secularization and bureaucratization of society. The contemporary expression of this ambivalent, critical view of progress as historically realized in the twentieth century has a neoMarxist and a neoconservative version. The neo-Marxist version attacks the exploitativeness of modern civilization and the compulsion to produce and consume without regard to need. The neoconservative version emphasizes the destruction of meaningful cosmology, the bases of morality, and the primary supportive institutions of family, community, and church that result from progress. In the third approach, the idea of progress was never accepted as an ordering theme for modern history. Its advocates include the historians Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt, who emphasized the uniqueness of historical phenomena, each epoch being equal and "immediate to God" and each to be judged according to its own standards. More recently, the popularizers of philosophy of history—Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee—proposed cyclical, organic models for the movement of history. The historical relativism of Ranke and Burckhardt has its contemporary formulation among anthropologists, some of whom tend to stress the uniqueness and equal validity of cultures. This is stated most consequentially in the structuralist school of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who tells us that in a sense magic and science are equally valid ways of knowing. Iggers concludes that despite the relativism of the historians and the romanticism of the anthropologists the modern world is the central historical experience of our existence. This modern world is fundamentally different from all other civilizations and cultures, and this difference rests on its progressive character. Modern society has been one of growth. This growth

Historical, Ideological, and Evolutionary

Aspects

19

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has affected the entire world so that one can speak for the first time of world h i s t o r y . . . . T h e critics of p r o g r e s s . . . . have not invalidated the core of the idea, the moral imperative to create a world in which the conditions for a dignified human existence, which today do not exist for billions of human beings, are achieved. That the idea of progress and its culture now dominate the world, though with important modifications from the Western version, is the theme of Alfred Meyer's essay on the idea of progress in communist ideology and Crawford Young's on the Third World. Meyer tells us that Marxism and Leninism combine eighteenth-century faith in progress and nineteenth-century critiques of industrialism in a single grand synthesis, with progress becoming a spiral development in which retrogression and alienation are necessary steps toward progress. Unlike the Western, more benign version, Marxism-Leninism as idea and as reality seeks to "push, shove, or drag" backward societies into the progressive tendencies of history by heroic effort. If the Western version of progress accepted the inequalities and inequities of industrial development, preserving areas of freedom, and providing for increasing mass political participation, the communist version of progress accepted the emphasis on science, technology, and material growth but traded off liberty and effective political participation for greater equality and mobilized participation. Crawford Young traces the diffusion of the idea of progress into the Third World, showing us how it has been adopted with modifications but with enthusiasm for its scientific and technical components. Progress in its historic meaning is not immanent in the beliefs of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism. Within each of these major world cosmologies, reform movements sought to reconcile progress with religious doctrine. Other sources of ambivalence regarding the content of progress and modernization have been the reactions against imperialism, postcolonial dependency, and the growing inequality engendered by the introduction of a modern sector. Thus, progress has been embraced in the Third World often in combination with some version of socialism, a strong affirmation of nationalism, and cultural independence. In the final chapter of Part One, Francisco Ayala approaches the concept of progress from the perspective of the evolutionary biologist. He points to the variety of ways progress has been defined by biologists and criticizes a number of efforts to measure biological progress. In his own view the "ability of organisms to obtain and process information about the e n v i r o n m e n t . . . [is] a criterion of progress that is particularly relevant to the evolution of man.'' T h e most fundamental human characteristic, according to Ayala, is this greatly developed (and through culture) constantly increasing "ability to perceive the

20

PART

I

environment and to react flexibly to it." According to this measure, Ayala argues that man is the most progressive organism on the planet. And it is precisely this ability to perceive, analyze, store, retrieve, and utilize information for purposes of mastery of and adaptation to the environment that is fully recognized in the Enlightenment and implemented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The import of Part I is that the idea of progress—and the civilization it has produced—is not just another historical phenomenon but that it represents the fulfillment of mankind's potential for the accumulation and interpretation of knowledge and the utilization of this knowledge for technical and organizational innovation in ways and to a degree not equaled by any prior historical experience. Furthermore, this idea of progress and the culture it has produced have come to so dominate the world that the notion that they will give way, short of major catastrophe, to some other, basically different culture would appear to be quite untenable.

1 The Enlightenment Idea of Progress Revisited NANNERL

O.

KEOHANE

The idea of progress, conventional wisdom has it, was first preached during the Enlightenment. It became an article of faith in the nineteenth century and remained the dominant doctrine in Western culture until the middle of the twentieth. But somber experiences and multiplying complexities have made the Enlightenment conception of progress obsolescent. The simple faith that things are steadily getting better and, moreover, can be relied on to continue to improve is now vulnerable to powerful opposing evidence and has few professed adherents. We know too much about the human condition to share the naive optimism that characterized eighteenth-century rationalists or those happy Victorians who flocked to the Crystal Palace in 1851. This "sadder but wiser" perspective is familiar from numerous contemporary writings. Ironically, one major component of the belief in progress is imbedded in this view. The doomsayers assume that our understanding of the human situation has, with the benefit of a century of experience and research, progressed beyond that available to our ancestors. In thinking about progress, at least, there has been progress. This is but one example of the extent to which the idea of progress, in one guise or another, permeates our perspective on the world. For some people, this pervasive belief in progress assumes the form of a theory of history, a systematic framework that allows us to account for the entire experience of humankind. Another perspective, represented by Robert Bierstedt, is that the notion of progress "hardly qualifies as an idea at all" but should be construed as "an attitude," an 21

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affirmation that some social change gives pleasure or elicits applause, "a phenomenon wholly devoid of objective validity." 1 From yet another vantage point, progress is a durable myth, a rhetorically persuasive ideology that allows people to make sense of past experiences and face the future armed with hope. Do such contemporary statements about progress describe actual patterns in human activity, or do they merely give one particular perspective on that activity? What difference does it make whether we believe in progress or not? In dealing with such questions, let us first note some of the problems of definition we are likely to encounter and then review the development of the Enlightenment idea. DEFINING PROGRESS

" T h e idea of the Progress of humanity," according to its most eminent twentieth-century historian, J. B. Bury, "means that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction." 2 Although Bury's definition does not approach the compactness of Charles van Doren's "irreversible meliorative change," it compares favorably with Arthur Lovejoy's more cautious "tendency inherent in nature or in man to pass through a regular sequence of stages of development in past, present, and future, the later stages being—with perhaps occasional retardations or minor retrogressions—superior to the earlier." 3 All three definitions share the elements of movement and improvement considered essential to the notion of progress. The idea of movement is fairly easy to grasp in this context. T h e human experience of alteration over a lifetime combined with accessible records from the past that document such changes make the concept of change itself uncontroversial. T h e more difficult question is that of melioration or improvement. How do we know that later stages of development are "superior" to earlier ones, that the direction of movement is "desirable"? All three definitions beg this essential question. However, Bury confronts it in his next sentence: "In order to judge that we are moving in a desirable direction, we should have to know precisely what the destination is." 4 T h e happiness of the species, in this view, is determined only after the fact; statements about progress are then provisional and tentative. Progress, one might say, means movement toward an outcome that would have been chosen had it been foreseen. Since we can never know the destination in advance, Bury's solution, if rigidly adopted, invalidates the whole concept, but it reminds 1. Robert Bierstedt, "Once More the Idea of Progress," in The Science of Society and the Unity of Mankind, memorial volume for Morris Ginsberg, ed. Ronald Fletcher (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 73. 2. J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1932; rpt. New York: Dover, 1955), p. 2. 3. Charles van Doren, The Idea of Progress (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 7; Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), p. i. 4. Bury, Idea of Progress, p. 2.

The Enlightenment

Idea of Progress Revisited

23

us that the notion of a goal or destination is closely associated with the idea of progress. We make progress as we advance toward the end of a journey or complete a task such as solving a puzzle or tidying a room. When we speak of making progress in learning Greek or getting to know somebody, we have no expectation of understanding the language perfectly or achieving complete intimacy. But the hypothetical end point establishes the other end of the line along which we are moving. A projected goal allows us to say that our movements have direction; aimless activity gives no basis for assessing progress. If we turn from everyday activity to the larger philosophical questions with which the idea of progress is concerned, we find that the most ardent Enlightenment proponents of the idea, Saint-Pierre, Turgot, and Condorcet, were staunch Utopians, who hypothesized a golden age toward which we were moving. Today, statements about progress are less grandiose, often based simply on a comparison of the present with the past. Lovejoy's definition, which posits a superior later stage, may do the job without requiring Bury's unknown destination. However, this still leaves unanswered the question of desirability or superiority. Unless we are headed in a direction that we all recognize as a desirable one, how can we establish that the direction of our movement is a proper one? What makes succeeding stages superior to earlier ones? The notion of progress is not always associated with desirability. Doctors speak of "the progress of a disease," even though no one desires the deterioration of the sick person. Rakes, as well as pilgrims, have made progress of which others have heatedly disapproved.5 Nonetheless, we commonly expect the notion to connote acquiring or approaching something worth having. What forms the basis for such judgments? Is it sufficient that someone thinks the direction is desirable, or is a consensus required? Can firm benchmarks be established that do not depend on idiosyncratic taste or transient perspectives? Looking about us, we see increases in diversity and complexity in certain areas of human life; in others, there is growing uniformity and congruence. Both complexity and congruence describe our modern age compared with the traditional past, but are these satisfactory criteria for progress? Is either diversity or uniformity valuable as such? One of the most important changes in the idea of progress in recent decades is that we have ceased to take for granted the desirability of things earlier generations assumed to be beneficial. The notion of progress has become so bound up with those things that we can, paradoxically, agree that "progress" in the conventional sense has taken place, yet deny that the change was for the better. The idea of progress has often been closely associated with an 5. John Baillie, The Belief in Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), Chap. 1. Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) closes with "Of the Progress and Termination of Despotism," an account of the progress of political corruption.

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increase in human achievements or transformations. In the eighteenth century, progress was synonymous with refinement, polish, and civility in contrast to crudity, barbarity, and rudeness. Artifice, defined as the highest natural achievement of our species or as counterposed to raw nature, was the core of this conception of progress and the grounds for the association of "cultured" with refined and superior. Benjamin Lincoln, a Revolutionary general and statesman, spoke for most of his contemporaries when he observed in 1792 that "civilization directs us to remove as fast as possible that natural growth from the lands." 6 This attitude is the basis for the present linkage of progress with such things as mechanization, technical innovation, and replacing forests with factories or housing developments. The notion of progress as refinement gave way to the notion as accumulation—of skills, of material comforts, of instruments of sophistication and control. It is not accidental, surely, that today we rarely speak of "progressing" but instead of "making" progress. Yet the very proliferation of techniques and products of technologies excites anxiety and criticism because to some observers the costs of such "refinements" loom larger than the benefits. This attitude was not unknown in the heyday of "the idea of progress." It is far more common today. Once we accept that progress has its "costs," we can see the value of sorting out different types of progress rather than lumping everything together in the amorphous "civilization" of Bury's definition. Ruth Macklin distinguishes four types and ranks them according to their probability or general acceptability. "It is wholly uncontroversial," she asserts, "to hold that technological progress has taken place; largely uncontroversial to claim that intellectual and theoretical progress has occurred; somewhat controversial to say that aesthetic or artistic progress has taken place; and highly controversial to assert that moral progress has occurred." 7 Each kind of progress requires its own canons to demonstrate improvement and desirability. They all depend, however, on cumulative development. T o show that progress has occurred in any of these domains, we must show that sequential advances were not accompanied by equally important losses. In the case of technology this is often easy. In more spiritual domains it is not so obvious that we incorporate the greatest achievements of past generations, avoid their errors, and move beyond them: but advances in techniques and 6. Quoted in Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), p. 68; cf. the similar opinion held by Marx and Engels, discussed in Alfred Meyer's essay in this volume, pp. 70-71. 7. Ruth Macklin, "Moral Progress," Ethics, 8 7 ( 4 ) (July 1977): 370. As Baillie puts it: "Observed progress is mainly technical whereas believed progress is mainly spiritual"; Belief in Progress, p. 156. In a working paper for an earlier conference on progress sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, H. Stuart Hughes adapted Marx's notion of the "substructure" of technology and productivity versus the "superstructure" of ideas and institutions to locate these two different types of progress.

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Idea of Progress

Revisited

25

skills are undeniable. The evidence of length of life, health, and comfort can only with extraordinary perversity be denied the label of improvement. Such achievements, however, are not necessarily sufficient ground for establishing "net progress" in human welfare (to use Ayala's term; see pp. 11 Off.). A New Yorker cartoon makes this point neatly; it shows the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse speeding down a superhighway on motorcycles. Technological progress creates difficulties as well as advantages. It makes possible certain kinds of aesthetic creations that were out of reach before but may also contribute to dullness and ugliness in the environment. It extends the capacities of tyrants and humanitarians alike. The growing complexity of knowledge means that although a few may comprehend more about nature than any human being in the past, most of us understand less about our surroundings, both man-made and natural, than earlier peoples whose lore was simpler but more proportional to their world. As Max Weber pointed out, we ride on streetcars but cannot tell how to build them; "the savage knew incomparably more about his tools." 8 In assessing who is the "we" who have progressed, it is important to recall that collective accomplishments for the species are often lodged in advantages for the few, whether economically privileged or intellectually elite. "We have progressed" does not necessarily imply "I am better off."? A different set of issues is raised by causal questions. What propels change along, and what determines its direction? Since the Enlightenment, there have been three main candidates: the hand of Providence, the unfolding of history, and the activities of human beings. The idea of progress is sometimes juxtaposed to a belief in Providence. Bury, for instance, asserts that the one supplanted the other as modern thought became more secularized. The distinction rests on the belief in an external cause of change, as opposed to asserting that transformations "proceed from a principle of advancement in the subject itself." 10 However, historically speaking, it is inaccurate to regard the two as mutually exclusive. Early versions of the theory of progress were direct offshoots of the belief in Providence. The "invisible hand" identified by classical economists, which combined individual human activities in a concerted forward movement, was, at the outset, the hand of God. Ernest Tuveson notes how the "dogma of progress, shedding its ecclesiastical trappings, nevertheless retained 8. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 139. 9. I am indebted to Ruth Marcus for this insight, offered during a seminar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, where a draft of this chapter was presented in March 1979. 10. Adam Ferguson, "Of Man's Progressive Nature," in his Principles of Moral and Political Science (Edinburgh, 1792), vol. 1; cf. Bury, Idea of Progress, pp. 5-6, 73-74.

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a smuggled Providence." 11 This is apparent in numerous "secular" accounts of history as progress, from Adam Ferguson to Hegel and beyond. The second candidate for the cause of change, the notion that history unfolds according to its own inner tendencies, particularly fascinated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers of progress. Imposing stages on history, whether four or twenty-four, is a delightful game. However, it is extremely difficult to devise a convincing account of the laws that govern the succession of such stages and to show why we should expect them to be invariant and benign. Almost all such accounts collapse into theories either of providential or of "anthropogenic" progress. 12 T h e final candidate for the cause of change is human activity itself. At the heart of most theories of progress is a fascination with human efforts to improve the human condition. One can easily combine all three candidates under this rubric: a divine beneficence created our species to undertake activities that result in unfolding stages of history. Whichever energy or motive force is identified as the root cause, the most striking feature of this dogma of progress is the conviction that knowledge, power, virtue, and happiness buttress one another and will be achieved together. In its most robust and purest form, the belief in progress affirms that increase in human knowledge, the establishment of human control over nature, and the perfecting of the moral excellences of the species will guarantee one another, with a concomitant increase in human happiness. This certainly rests on beliefs drawn from Judeo-Christian and classical sources, combined with seventeenth-century optimism about man's estate. THE CONSTITUENTS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

Bury depicts the idea of progress as a monolithic entity waiting to be discovered. He excuses the Greeks for not quite seeing it, despite all their other accomplishments, and makes a good deal of identifying the exact moment when the idea was first formulated. This way of investigating the history of ideas presents some major pitfalls. 13 Several elements have been combined to form what we call a theory or ideology of progress. Each of these elements was familiar from antiquity, and each is still with us. T h e notion of progress depends on combining them in a particular way. 11. Ernest Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), p. 201; see also Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 60. 12. Van Doren distinguishes "anthropogenic" theories of progress, based on man's "collective or social memory," from "cosmogenic theories," which regard Providence as the source of progress or else ascribe it to some impersonal cosmic principle in the universe itself; Idea of Progress, Chap. 2. 13. See Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory, 8 (1969): 3-53.

The Enlightenment

Idea of Progress

Revisited

27

Among the elements prominent in Judaism (and Christianity) is the conviction that man was licensed by his creator to dominate nature for his own use. This conception of the relationship between humankind and other parts of nature, which differs profoundly from that found in other ancient cultures, is central to the notion of progress. It certifies that human conquest of nature is divinely blessed. It teaches us to think of control and power as the proper ends of knowledge. Genesis, however, gives no guarantee that man will progress with such mastery. Although this condition was a feature of paradise, the desire to know and control also led to the expulsion from the garden and the lowering of man's estate. A second element crucial to the theory of progress in Judeo-Christian doctrine is the belief that history, at least for the chosen or elect, has a happy ending. This divine plan became particularly important to the early Christians, who looked for an early Second Coming and found comfort for their tribulations in a belief in the millennium. The elements of material well-being associated more recently with the doctrine of progress are offshoots of this conviction that the last stage of earthly history will be delightful. Consider the vivid description by Saint Irenaeus (ca. 125-ca. 202): T h e days will come, in which vines shall grow, each having ten thousand branches, and in each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each true twig ten thousand shoots, and in each one of the shoots ten thousand clusters, and on every one of the clusters ten thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed will give five and twenty metretes of wine. And when any one of the saints shall lay hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, "I am a better cluster, take me; bless the Lord through me." 1 4 The millennium, however, was expected to follow periods of tribulation and decline. It was a gift of God's grace to the faithful, not an achievement steadily won by human activity. A third, especially Christian, aspect was the conviction that over time there will be increasing revelation. God's truth was made more and more manifest from the Old Testament to the New, and on through the refinements of the Fathers of the Church. This sense of cumulative truth is closely akin to that professed by the optimistic believers in progress. The image of men sitting on shoulders of giants, able to see further by virtue of their increased stature, is often used as a symbol for progress from the Middle Ages to modern times. 15 It was no doubt connected with the images of the evangelists sitting on the shoulders of the prophets, depicted so memorably in the north transept windows at Chartres Cathedral. 14. Saint Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 33; quoted in Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia, p. 22. 15. Robert Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (New York: Praeger, 1965), offers a delightful account of his researches into the origins of this metaphor.

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To these Judeo-Christian contributions must be added those of the Greeks and Romans. Ludwig Edelstein, in his elegant study of early ideas of progress, quotes Xenophanes' succinct expression of the belief in the gradual discovery of truth about the world by human effort, with beneficial results for human life: "The gods did not reveal to men all things from the beginning; but men through their own search find in the course of time that which is better." 16 In De Rerum Natura, which offers a detailed description of this process, Lucretius speculates on anthropological history and outlines the stages by which men learned arts and skills for making their lives more comfortable but, therefore, more complex. He presents a set of stages in profane history, rooted in the production of goods and organization of societies, quite different from the stages of sacred history as outlined in the book of Daniel or by Joachim de Floris (ca. 1132-1202). 17 Lucretius uses the term progredienles—moving forward step by step—but does not describe the process as an overall increase in happiness. For Lucretius, as for Seneca, the conflicts and corruptions that mark human history are as important as the increase in skills or knowledge and supply evidence of accompanying decadence or decay. One further aspect of Greek thought is relevant: the Socratic conviction that virtue is knowledge, that men do not willingly perform acts they know will bring pain and unhappiness to themselves. In this view, the increase in human rationality or comprehension of the world constitutes an increase in moral excellence; as individual men discover truth, they learn more about what it means to live life rightly, and they behave more virtuously. But Socrates and his followers (especially Plato) saw no reason to suppose that humankind become more rational over time. To these philosophers, history was cyclical or retrogressive, and, therefore, they cannot be enlisted among the believers in progress. The knowledge they associated with rationality and virtue is far removed from the amassing of what we today call empirical understanding. Nonetheless, they contributed a central moral element to the theory of progress: the association of knowing and acting well. During the Renaissance, many of these ideas were recovered or expanded. Jurists such as Bodin and Le Roy displayed a new interest in history; artisans developed pride in technical skill and a sense of guild cooperation that helped lay the groundwork for the belief in intellectual and technological advances of succeeding generations; 18 discovery 16. Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 317. For Lucretius, see Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 9-10; for sacred history, see Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia, Chap. 1. 18. Edgar Zilsel, "The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Progress," and A.C. Keller, "Zilsel, the Artisans, and the Idea of Progress in the Renaissance," in Roots of Scientific Thought, ed. Philip Wiener and Aaron Noland (New York: Basic Books, 1957), pp. 251-75, 281-86.

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29

and exploration of new worlds offered material for comparison between "civilized" and "primitive" societies and engendered pride in the fruits of sophisticated human artifice. 19 In the seventeenth century these various elements were brought together to give grounds for optimism about future human possibilities, but without a corresponding sense of past achievement. Nonetheless, in the era of Bacon and Descartes, we first recognize a pattern of argument that can sensibly be labeled "the idea of progress." SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY OPTIMISM

The vigorous optimism of Bacon, Descartes, and their followers about the capacity of the human mind to discover useful truths for the comfort and improvement of the species was a crucial contribution to the notion of progress. Their certainty, however, had nothing to do with past progress. They saw the blind toil of their ancestors as fruitless, men wasting their efforts for want of proper method. "There was but one course left, therefore," announced Bacon in the preface to his Great lnstauration\ "to try the whole thing anew upon a better plan, and to commence a total reconstruction of the sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations.... For of this there is some issue; whereas in what is now done in the matter of science there is only a whirling round about, and perpetual agitation, ending where it began." 20 Bacon's assurance that the new beginning would issue in unprecedented accomplishment rested on two factors: method and motive. The method was to "establish progressive stages of certainty," beginning with the evidence of the senses and depending upon instruments and machinery rather than unaided logic to establish truth. Technology augments the forces of understanding as it does manual strength. Bacon warned against "anticipations," assumptions not supported by evidence, laced together intricately in systems as insubstantial as a spider's web. This tendency was the main difficulty with intellectual endeavor throughout past history. Bacon asserted: Though all the wits of all the ages should meet together and combine and transmit their labours, yet will no great progress ever be made in science by means of anticipations; because radical errors in the first concoction of the mind are not to be cured by the excellence of functions and remedies subsequent.... We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress. 21 19. See Pearce, Savages of America, and Meek, Social Science-, as well as Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). 20. Francis Bacon, Preface to The Great Instauration, in Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (New York: Odyssey Press, 1965), p. 299. 21. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, Chap. 31, in Francis Bacon, p. 334.

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The second factor—the proper motive—assured rapid progress. If we "consider what are the true ends of knowledge," we will set out to learn "not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things; but for the benefit and use of life," as we "perfect and govern it in charity." According to Bacon, the original sin was not "that pure and uncorrupted knowledge whereby Adam gave names to the creatures," but rather "the ambitious and proud desire of moral knowledge," the revolt from God's legislative power over us. To desire power for oneself, or over one's country, is "vulgar and degenerate," a source of sin; but "if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe," his ambition is noble and wholesome, and will be divinely blessed.22 Bacon's sense of nature's role in this adventure was complex. We must respect nature to ensure her cooperation—obey her in order to command her—but the goal is human mastery.25 There is no doubt about God's support for such endeavors. Bacon depicts God as a devotee of hide-and-seek, inviting the "human spirit for his playfellow" at the game of innocent discovery of truth. If we proceed in this spirit, we may hope that the "commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things, which is more precious than anything on earth, may be restored to its perfect and original condition." As we imitate the creative works of God for human good, he will repay the enterprise most handsomely: "Thou wilt make us partakers of thy vision and thy sabbath."24 The utilitarian conviction that scientific enterprise must be undertaken "for the benefit and use of life" if it is to bear fruit is balanced in Bacon's work by the pure joy in the discovery of truth. He praises the increase of knowledge itself, "the very beholding of the light," as a "fairer thing than all the uses of it," and "more worthy than all the fruit of inventions." For Bacon, these two aspects of the search for truth are not mutually exclusive but complementary. He asserts that there will never be "much progress in the sciences" until "natural philosophy be carried on and applied to particular sciences, and particular sciences be carried back again to natural philosophy."25 From this mutual refreshment of pure and applied science we may expect great things; and this is the rule established in Bacon's research Utopia, New Atlantis (1627), where the "End of our Foundation is the knowledge 22. Bacon, Preface to The Great 1, Chap. 129, p. 375.

Instauration,

p. 310; and Novum

Organum,

Book

23. Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, Chap. 3, p. 331; on Bacon's exploitative attitude toward nature's bounty, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, Ca.: Harper & Row, 1980). 24. Bacon, Preface to The Great Instauration and concluding paragraph of "The Plan of the W o r k . " 25. Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, Chap. 80, p. 253.

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of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible." 2 6 Several of Bacon's successors, including Thomas Burnet and Robert Boyle, were even more optimistic. They carried out their own scientific discoveries in the conviction that they were contributing to the reversal of the Fall from grace and the reestablishment of the human race in its original condition. They assumed that God, like a skillful workman, had built a universe that did not require continual tinkering or supervision but ran of its own accord on regular principles. This means, as Tuveson puts it, that "the plot of nature is written into the structure of the universe itself," and the idea of progress can emerge from that of Providence. 27 As men discover these laws and work in accord with them, they transform the earth for human betterment and also redeem humankind from sin. In this scheme of salvation through "cosmic progressivism," the neo-Platonic vision of the ascent of the soul through the various stages of the good was joined with optimism about the divine plan for history, and thus, the whole story of the Fall was reinterpreted. Burnet described the Fall as a "moral degeneration" extending over many centuries rather than a momentary lapse in a mystical garden. 2 8 Human failings had swept away the age of gold; God had ordained that human works could bring it back again. A more secular but equally bold faith marked Descartes' certainty. He was confident that God had not created a fundamentally disordered or malicious universe, so that assiduous and well-intentioned human labors in gathering knowledge by the proper method would yield rich fruits for human life. Descartes' confidence and rationalistic method were just as influential as Bacon's; and the combined legacies of these two thinkers gave their century new enthusiasm about the human capacity to know and control the world. There followed a new optimism about the future. Earlier generations had regarded the pattern of history as ceaseless cyclical movement or overall decline, or they thought that history (apart from sacred history) had no pattern at all. They were humble or skeptical about human reason. Montaigne's dictum was atypical only in its elegance: "Man does not know the natural infirmity of his mind; it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it." 2 9 In the seventeenth century, for the first time, many thoughtful persons were convinced that a route had been found out of such sterile whirling, a route that would establish the human race in its proper place in the 26. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in Francis Bacon, p. 447. 27. Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia, p. 119. 28. T h o m a s Burnet, Theory

of the Earth

( 1 6 8 4 - 1 6 9 0 ) , discussed in ibid., Chap. 5.

29. Montaigne, "Of Experience," in The Complete

Essays of Montaigne,

ed. Donald

F r a m e (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1958), Book 3, number 13, p. 817.

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great chain of being. The future would surely be brighter than the past. In this climate even Pascal, whose assessment of the corruption and triviality of the human condition unaided by God's grace is as dark as any in literature, was optimistic about human reason and the progress of science. He recalled the Greek belief that the secrets of nature are revealed over time and explained this by the cumulative efforts of generations. Human life is a learning experience; the whole race, like a single individual becoming wiser with age, augments skills and avoids errors. We, maturer and more proficient than our ancestors, are the true "ancients," not the Greeks and Romans who lived in the infancy of the world. For "tous les hommes ensemble y font un continuel progrès à mesure que l'univers vieillit... ,"30 In all this optimism about the human prospect, however, it is rare to find any conviction that men will improve steadily in virtue and brotherhood as knowledge grows. The Christian Platonists' assurance that men work out their own salvation implied progress in virtue; but only faith in God's plan for the species gave grounds for this assurance. Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal all believed that "civil knowledge"— knowledge about morality, society, and politics—is the most difficult to establish firmly. They made no rosy predictions about morals or politics to match their visions in science and technique. In this, they were more akin to our contemporary mood than their successors of the next two centuries. The awareness that technological sophistication and material comfort can be accompanied by moral and social decadence has been part of the Western consciousness since philosophers first mused on the decay of Greece and the decline of Rome. The fully developed theory of progress required an explanation for such asymmetries between technique and virtue in the past, along with arguments to show why increasing control over our world in the future will assure increasing happiness and moral excellence. Such a theory has been held by only a small number of persons, compared with those in past or present who have endorsed other elements of the idea of progress. Most of those persons lived in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries; and the arguments about virtue and happiness that were needed to complete the theory were the contributions of the era of Enlightenment to the idea of progress.

T H E FIRST STAGE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The Abbé de Saint-Pierre, an enthusiastic Cartesian, was first responsible for asserting that progress can be expected not only in physical 30. Pascal, "Preface pour le Traité du Vide" (ca. 1657), in Pascal's Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), pp. 533-34.

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science but in social science and morality as well. His age, which spanned the last generation of Louis X I V and the first generation of the Enlightenment, was impressed by the immense gains in knowledge of the natural world and struck by the contrasting stagnation and sterility in the social sciences. T h e abbé, in his utilitarian treatises and projects, preached the conviction that equally impressive progress in morality and politics would follow the application of the new scientific method to these areas. He assured his readers that the principles of political and moral science are as invariant as those of physics and proposed academies of social science to carry out research and to educate the public. 51 He believed that discoveries in the human sciences solve the most urgent problems of humankind and move it along toward earthly bliss. Saint-Pierre's arguments depended on the power of human reason, correctly focused and directed, to devise policies for ensuring human happiness. His system involved punishments and rewards to channel behavior toward useful pleasure and away from antisocial vice and depended on the support of strong governments. It appeared obvious to the abbé that civilization was bound to triumph and an earthly paradise was not far away once men put their reason to its proper uses. Few eighteenth-century philosophers shared such a wide-ranging and simplistic optimism about human reason, and to attribute this mood to the Enlightenment in general is unwarranted. 32 Voltaire, Diderot, and Kant held more complex and guarded views about the human prospect; and Rousseau was the most eloquent of all critics of the idea of progress. However, numerous writers in this era shared a more diffuse optimism about rationality that made progress seem possible, if not inevitable. The instruments of education and legislation upon which Saint-Pierre relied for the success of his science of utility were refined by Helvétius and Condillac. T h e concept of controlling human behavior, even shaping human nature, to ensure that men would pursue their own secular happiness efficiently became familiar. And a new theory of historical development provided the temporal framework in which such advances could be explained and predicted. At the Sorbonne in 1750, Turgot delivered a discourse on the stages of civilization in history, a recurrent theme in Saint-Pierre's volumi31. See Saint-Pierre's Ouvrages de Politique, 16 vols. (Rotterdam, 1 7 3 3 - 1 7 4 1 ) , in which he suggests among other reform projects a more rational orthography. For his ideas on moral and political progress, consult Bury, Idea of Progress, Chap. 6; and N. O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), Chap. 12.

32. Carl Becker's provocative Heavenly

City of the Eighteenth-Century

Philoso-

phers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1 9 3 2 ) is one source of this attribution. For the opposite opinion, consult Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1 9 5 9 ) ; and Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961).

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nous writings. Turgot's "Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind" presented evidence that the human adventure proceeds in a generally positive direction. Using Pascal's analogy, he compares the race to a single individual maturing in wisdom and virtue. "Finally," asserts Turgot, "commercial and political ties unite all parts of the globe, and the whole human race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on advancing, although at a slow pace, toward greater perfection." 3 5 T h e evidence Turgot provided was the different condition of human societies, using the "barbarism" of contemporary American savages as the benchmark against which the development of other nations could be measured. 34 This "four stages" theory of economic and social change—from hunting through pastoral life and agriculture to modern commercial economies—became quite popular in the second part of the eighteenth century. Those who embraced it had no doubt that the commercial way of life was superior to and more civilized than the earlier stages. T h e comparison of Scotland and France with simple hunting tribes in America offered decisive proof of progress in social organization, economic production and commerce, and communication. The "low material and cultural level" of the savage was correlated directly with the absence of sophisticated technology and institutions such as property, hierarchy, and capital. 35 It was taken for granted in the eighteenth century that the most distinctive human trait was the capacity for social and scientific adaptiveness—the finishing or perfecting of the species, "la perfectibilité." 3 6 In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (entitled A Treatise on Refinement at one stage), Adam Ferguson took issue with the venerable distinction between art and nature on the grounds that "art itself is natural to man. He is in some measure the artificer of his own frame, as well as his fortune, and is destined, from the first age of his being, to invent and contrive." It is in our nature to improve ourselves, according to "a principle of progression" implanted in our species. Thus, it is inappropriate to suppose that we have "quitted the state of 33. T u r g o t ' s discourse is included in Turgot on Progress, Sociology, and Economics, ed. Ronald Meek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 9 7 5 ) , pp. 4 1 - 5 9 . 34. Ibid., p. 4 2 ; Turgot's explanation for differential rates of progress is the irregularity of nature's bounty; she has bestowed her gifts unequally; therefore, s o m e people advance m o r e rapidly than others. 35. Meek, Social Science, pp. 1 2 9 - 5 5 ; Pearce, Savages of America, p. 85. T h e indebtedness of T u r g o t and others to Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government (Chap. 5, o n p r o p e r t y ) is particularly obvious o n this point. F o r a m o d e r n s t a t e m e n t of the opposite belief, that the m o v e m e n t f r o m hunting and gathering to agriculture was a necessary adaptation to a changing e n v i r o n m e n t that had numerous unpleasant consequences for the species, see Mark N . Cohen, The Food Crisis in Prehistory (New H a v e n , Conn.: Y a l e University Press, 1 9 7 7 ) . 36. E v e n Rousseau's second Discourse, on the "Origins of Inequality," a searing indictment of the view that we have " p r o g r e s s e d " in virtue and happiness as our technologies and sciences improve, retains the concept of "perfectability" in a neutral form.

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nature" since we have begun to proceed; che state of nature is found wherever human beings are.37 The seventeenth-century idea that the principle of progress is God's plan for human redemption from the Fall remained prominent in several of these writings. 38 But, in demonstrating that moral progress has occurred and will continue, the Enlightenment authors improved upon their forebears. The proponents of the four stages theory relied on demonstrating that improving communication among members of our species and increasing commerce among societies must necessarily ensure an increase in virtue. According to Lord Monboddo, a prominent figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, "God has so ordered matters, that civil society has furnished a remedy" for the very evils it brings about; for "the love of knowledge has, by means of civil society, and that close intercourse and communication of men which it produces, invented and cultivated arts and science, by which the defect of our intelligence, the cause of all our evils, is . . . in some degree remedied." 39 Here is the rationalistic principle that intellectual defects are the source of all other evils, with the concomitant assurance that reparations in intellectual deficiencies will lead to increasing virtue over time. Here we have the last linchpin in the theory of progress: the reliance on civilized society itself to confirm the inevitability of human improvement. THE ZENITH OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS: CONDORCET

This faith that civilized progress perpetuates itself is brought to fullness in the Marquis de Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, composed in a few months in 17931794 while Condorcet was in hiding from Robespierre. Notwithstanding its brevity and melodramatic circumstances, this treatise provides the clearest and most uncompromising statement of the Enlightenment theory of progress. Ironically, it affirms Condorcet's implacable faith in a brilliant future on the very eve of his own miserable death at the hands of the forces he identified with progress. Like Pascal and Turgot, Condorcet also bases his theory on the analogy between the race and the individual, each learning by experience from the simplest sensations to complex ideas. And just as individuals store information, so members of our species create a collective memory and a repertoire of skills and knowledge. Each stage 37. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), pp. 6-8. 38. See Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia, pp. 195-96; Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 36; Bryson points out that for Ferguson, "progression is the gift of God to all his intelligent creatures." 39. Lord James Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics (1779-1799) 6 vols.; quote is from vol. 6, 255, as cited in Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia, p. 189. The same idea can be found in Turgot and Ferguson as well.

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in history is "the result of what has happened at all previous moments" and influences what happens next. As communication is perfected, progress in all areas of life becomes "a hope that is almost a certainty." Of course there are obstacles: the prejudices that afflict human reason, which are aided by ignorance and supported by powerful interests. But Condorcet has no doubt about the outcome. He sets out to "demonstrate how nature has joined together indissolubly the progress of knowledge and that of liberty, virtue, and respect for the natural rights of man." As soon as enlightenment reaches all parts of the globe and commerce knits them together, "all will be the friends of humanity, all will work together for its perfection and its happiness." 4 0 The bulk of Condorcet's treatise describes ten stages of human development, from the simplest hunting societies through the development of agriculture, the division of labor, the origin of government, and thence into the eras of history from the Greeks to the French Revolution. He celebrates especially the invention of the alphabet, advances in education and literacy, and the growing awareness of human rights and dignity. But Condorcet does not end his survey with his own day. He notes that "the forces of enlightenment are still in possession of no more than a very small portion of the globe." His confidence in the future destiny of man rests on his belief that not only European science and technology but also the high moral principles recently discovered in France will be disseminated around the globe by modern communication. When the benefits of human reason are distributed to every member of the race, then we can speak of the true perfection of mankind. 4 1 According to Condorcet, progress requires "the abolition of inequality between nations" as well as "the progress of equality within each nation." The equality that he foresees is not a sterile uniformity, but a "condition in which everyone will have the knowledge necessary to conduct himself in the ordinary affairs of life, according to the light of his own reason," to understand and exercise his abilities and rights. The progress of the peoples of Africa and Asia "is likely to be more rapid and certain than our own because they can receive from us everything that we have had to find out for ourselves." His generosity extends also to the female sex. Condorcet identifies the "complete anihilation of the prejudices" on which sexual inequality rests as one of the most important "causes of the progress of the human mind," a central contribution to general happiness. Here he anticipates both Fourier and Marx. 42 Compared with his seventeenth-century precur40. Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough, introd. Stuart Hampshire (London: Wiennfeld & Nicolson, 1955), pp. 4, 10, 184. 41. Ibid., pp. 169-74. 42. Ibid., pp. 189-90, 193; cf. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic MSS. of 1844," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 69-70; and Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements, quoted in The Utopian

The Enlightenment

Idea of Progress

Revisited

37

sors, who attributed the downfall of Adam (and the race itself) to Eve, Condorcet's ideas are revolutionary. He cuts boldly through the intricate arguments of "the woman question" with his assertion that "this inequality has its origin solely in an abuse of strength, and all the later sophistical attempts that have been made to excuse it are vain."43 The central purpose of Condorcet's Sketch was to demonstrate beyond any doubt that the several components of progress are inextricably connected and guarantee one another. As human knowledge grows, we also learn more about ordering and classifying what we know so that ideas which at first were grasped only by geniuses become part of the workaday equipment of ordinary human beings. As more and more people are made capable of participating in the advancement of knowledge everywhere, we can expect rapid progress in all parts of science and increasing productivity in industry and agriculture. This in turn ensures a higher standard of living, and thus we can expect population (the standard eighteenth-century measure of human welfare) to increase rapidly. Medical and dietary improvements will extend the span of life till it becomes indefinite, and death itself an exceptional event.44 Moral and political sciences will advance as inexorably as all the others, asserts Condorcet, and as they do, the faulty institutions and corrupt laws and habits that are the foundation of human viciousness will surely disappear. We will learn to reconcile, nay, identify, "the interests of each with the interests of all." Men will learn to reflect before they act, and will see the connections between their own good and that of the whole society of which they are a part. Permanent confederations between nations and universal free trade will remove the causes of war, and international organizations will hasten universal brotherhood. In all these ways, ethics are as susceptible to perfectibility as all other areas of human life. For, affirms Condorcet, "nature has linked together in an unbreakable chain truth, happiness and virtue."45 The progress of humanity, unlike the maturing of a single individual, has no limit. "The perfection of human faculties," asserts the marquis, will continue until the earth itself is destroyed, or some Vision of Charles Fourier, ed. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 195-96. 43. Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture, p. 193. 44. Ibid., pp. 188-89. 45. Ibid., pp. 189-93; see also p. 168. Condorcet gives no sign of worrying about the complications and problems introduced by the coordination of individual good intentions in activities round the globe. His blindness to this set of problems may have something to do with the initial adoption of the analogy of the race to the individual, which predisposes him to assume that the problems of the former are no more complex than those of individuals set side by side. "The progress of the human mind," he asserts, "is subject to the same general laws that can be observed in the development of the faculties of the individual, and it is indeed no more than the sum of that development realized in a large number of individuals joined together in society" (p. 4).

38

NANNERL

O.

KEOHANE

unexpected change "deprives the human race of its present faculties and its present resources." No "new invasion of the Tartars" need be feared by refined societies since the Tartars themselves will be refined. Condorcet recognizes that a burgeoning population poses a long-term threat. But he reassures his readers that when civilized humanity threatens to exceed the earth's capacity, the rational and virtuous beings who inhabit our perfected orb will curb reproductive growth rather than "encumber the world with useless and wretched beings," recognizing that "if they have a duty towards those who are not yet born, that duty is not to give them existence, but to give them happiness." Such assurance that the drama of humanity will have a happy ending is a great consolation for the philosopher in his adversity, concludes Condorcet. The vision of human progress is for him an asylum, in which the memory of his persecutors cannot pursue him; there he lives in thought with man restored to his natural rights and dignity, forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, fear or envy; there he lives with his peers in an Elysium created by reason and graced by the purest pleasures known to the love of mankind.46 A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW

Condorcet's nineteenth-century successors among philosophers of progress were a heterogeneous group: Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, Schelling, Darwin, and Spencer. The technocratic programs of the French social theorists were closely related to the utilitarian projects of Saint-Pierre and the optimistic rationalism of Condorcet. The rich treatises of the German idealists describe history unfolding organically according to its own inner tendencies through the works of humankind. When Darwin referred to the evolution of the species as progressive, theories in history and biology began to reinforce one another.47 In all these variations on the theme of progress, an anthropocentric perspective allows the affirmation that progress is occurring. To call the evolution of species, but not changes in the cosmos, "progressive," as Ayala does (see pp. 106ff.), is to be faithful to the history of the concept and its linguistic usage; it reflects the implicit assumption that human development is the measure of progress. Few of us would readily attach the label to further developments involving the extinction of our species and the survival of fitter beasts such as cockroaches and snails. Placing our own species at the top of the evolutionary tree corresponds to placing one's own era near the end of history's unfolding, which apostles of progress usually do. Progress turns out to be movement toward wherever the observer is, joined with the certainty 46. Ibid., pp. 201-02. 47. Bury, Idea of Progress, p. 336, quotes the conclusion of the Origin of Species'. "As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental environments will tend to progress towards perfection."

The Enlightenment

Idea of Progress

Revisited

39

that things will continue much the same in the future. Adam Smith, said Bagehot, used the idea of progress to show "how from being a savage, man rose to be a Scotchman." 4 8 Such an anthropocentric perspective on the theory of progress is closely connected with shifting human valuations of the quality of human life. Moses Abramovitz suggests that progress might be gauged by looking at the kinds of things people are unhappy about (see p. 280). Another way of putting it would be to look at what we take for granted. W e depend on innumerable aids and comforts that would have seemed miraculous a century ago; but we have ceased to be able to take for granted things our ancestors regarded as the simplest given things of life—fresh air, clean water, open land. If we look back at the components of the theory of progress, we can see how each of them is now called into question. W e no longer give universal assent to the idea that humanity is the rightful lord of nature, put on the earth to manage and control its bounty in whatever way it thinks best. W e can hardly be sanguine about an inevitable happy ending, given all the possibilities for global tragedy brought incessantly to our attention. Even the millennium, it appears, may turn out to be a sterile wasteland from the perspective of human happiness. 49 The sense of cumulative truth fares better, perhaps, but even here there are dissenting voices, as well as a growing awareness of the rich perspectives gone forever in the cultures of the past. And the conviction that virtue is knowledge—that to know the good is to will it—is not one the twentieth century finds generally persuasive. Isaiah Berlin describes the durable conviction that all good things will fit together perfectly if we can only find the proper formula, as the fallacy on which Western civilization is founded. 50 This same belief that good things come in clusters, that knowledge, power, virtue, and happiness are interconnected and stand surety for one another, is the Enlightenment addition to the theory of progress that is most problematical for us today. Condorcet's visions of technological improvement and material betterment have been overfulfilled. His predictions about morality and politics have a very different sound today. T h e naive assurance that our virtue and happiness have steadily progressed seems particularly infused with the wishful thinking to which a philosopher is liable as he consoles himself in his cell. It is not that we have all reverted to an earlier view of history as a record of moral and social degeneration. Instead, we are becoming aware of a factor of which earlier generations had little notion: increasing social complexity and interdependence, which, far from ensuring advances in intimacy and virtue, multiply the problems of the 48. Quoted in Bryson, Man and Society,

p. 89.

49. Gunther Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of

Progress

(New Y o r k : Natural History Press, 1969). 50. Isaiah Berlin, " T h e Question of Machiavelli," New York Review of Books, N o vember 4, 1971; and his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 154-72.

40

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KEOHANE

species at least as fast as our capacity to grasp them—much less solve them satisfactorily and move on. We have discovered that "rationality" splinters our lives as rapidly as it orders them. Human control over human beings, by legislation and by education, was the Enlightenment's final contribution to the theory of progress. It has now become the battleground on which the outcome of all other constituents of progress must depend. In the eyes of some observers, our only hope for extricating ourselves from the dilemmas of modernity is a "recrudescence of religion," a recapturing of the "aura of the sacred" in our approach to knowledge and to human life. According to Robert Nisbet, theories of progress in the past rested heavily on religious beliefs, and it is the disappearance of this underlying structure that accounts for the evaporation of the belief in progress. His claims on this score are tangled and controversial, but the evidence clearly supports at least one of his central claims: the historical connection between "confidence in the existence of a divine power" and confidence in "design or pattern in the world."51 Most past theories of progress depended heavily on the conviction that all things work together for good in the long run because a beneficent creator willed it to be so. This gave ground for some certainty that even the messiest human efforts would resolve themselves in rational conclusions. The belief that an omnipotent, divine agency is ultimately responsible for making sense of our most nonsensical performances carries an element of comfort that cannot easily be matched in any other way. It also carries the potential for greater danger in our current situation. Throughout history, one favored device for describing human progress has been the analogy between the development of the species and the maturation of a single individual, the progressive "education of the human race."52 Perhaps the mark of maturity in a species, as in an individual, is willingness to take sober responsibility for our own actions and their consequences instead of assuming that a paternalistic Father-God always stands ready to extricate us from our self-imposed dilemmas, a deus ex machina eternally prepared to guarantee a happy ending for a species bent on folly. Such a conception of maturity is consonant with either a secular or a religious vision of the world. It is not consonant with a simplistic faith that we can have everything we want without sacrifices or hard thinking. That progress in some areas is quite likely to mean cutbacks somewhere else is an idea to which we have yet to become accustomed. We are not yet "mature," but we may be maturing. We ask questions that would have made no sense to earlier generations. If the answers we give make sense to later ones, that will be time enough to say that progress has occurred. 51. Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 355-56. 52. Ibid., p. 61, shows how this image was broached by Saint Augustine and echoed by numerous subsequent philosophers of progress.

2 The Idea of Progress in Historiography and Social Thought Since the Enlightenment GEORG

G.

IGGERS

OVERVIEW

In a quite fundamental way, a sense of history is incompatible with the idea of progress. This at least was the perception of the nineteenthcentury historian who has often been considered a founder of history as a modern, professionalized, scholarly discipline, Leopold von Ranke. 1 T h e idea of progress, he held, was primarily a philosophic notion; but history and philosophy pursued fundamentally different aims, the latter seeking to systematize reality, to reduce it to concepts; the former seeking to grasp the uniqueness of historical phenomena, to restore them in their concrete living reality. From the historical perspective the idea of progress represented a distortion of the past. Instead of comprehending the past in its own terms, the idea of progress viewed the past philosophically as a stepping stone to an end result. It thus reduced history to a scheme which violated the individuality and diversity of the past. In his critique Ranke had Hegel in mind. But the idea of progress was more than an abstract philosophical notion and proved to be much more compatible with a historical perspective than Ranke admitted. It represented an all-encompassing world view shared by broad segments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social thought. Despite their formal rejection of the idea of progress, Ranke and much of 1. See Leopold von Ranke, "On Progress in History (1854)," in his The Theory and Practice of History, ed. Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1973), pp. 51-56. 41

42

GEORG

G. I G G E R S

the historical school of the nineteenth century shared the basic assumptions of the idea.2 It is indeed misleading to seek a concise definition of the idea, for example, as "irreversible meliorative change" and then establish that ideas of progress were a persistent theme in the history of Western thought since the Hebrews and the Greeks. 3 T o be certain, there was an awareness in Greek and Roman writings, for example, by Thucydides, Polybius, and Lucretius, as there was for that matter in Chinese historical literature, that the modern age is more complex than the past. Thucydides had already spoken of stages of development: a nomadic culture gave way in Greece to a pastoral, agricultural, and finally a commercial civilization 4 —four stages remarkably similar to those which appear in the writings of the Scottish moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. 5 But this awareness of growing complexity was not accompanied by a confidence in the improvement of man or even in the liberating function of science and education. For Thucydides, this complexity provided the setting for the most awesome war in history. For him as for Lucretius, the very conditions of modern civilization opened a bleak prospect for a future marked by conflict and intellectual decline over which men had little control. But the various attempts by recent theorists to see in the modern idea of progress a secularized form of Judeo-Christian conceptions of Providence are hardly satisfactory. 6 The content of the modern idea of progress is fundamentally different. Even in the Judeo-Christian tradition a clear distinction exists between Hebraic prophetic visions and Christian views from Augustine and Joachim de Floris to Bossuet, in which this worldly strife and misery are overcome in a final, transhistorical redemption in which justice and peace are achieved on earth, albeit through divine intervention. T h e millenarian conception of the apocalyptic transformation, it has been argued, finds an unintended 2. Cf. Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1 9 6 8 ) . 3. Charles van D o r e n , The Idea of Progress ( N e w Y o r k : P r a e g e r , 1 9 6 7 ) , p. 3; see also R o b e r t Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress ( N e w Y o r k : Basic Books, 1 9 8 0 ) . T h e conception that the idea of progress is a secularization and for s o m e a distortion of a Christian idea is persistent in m o d e r n thought. See W a r r e n W a g a r , " M o d e r n Views of the Origins of the Idea of P r o g r e s s , " Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967): 55-70. 4. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R e x W a r n e r ( N e w Y o r k : Penguin Books, 1 9 7 8 ) , pp. 3 5 - 4 6 ; see also Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore, Md.: J o h n s H o p k i n s University Press, 1 9 6 7 ) . 5. Of Scottish philosophers, I have in mind particularly J o h n Millar, A d a m F e r guson, but also A d a m Smith; see Duncan Forbes, ed., "Introduction" to A d a m Fergu-

son, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1 9 6 6 ) ; and Ronald S. Meek, Social bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 9 7 6 ) .

Science

and the

Ignoble

Savage

(Cam-

6. See Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress; and Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study on the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 9 4 9 ) .

Progress in Historiography and Social Thought

43

echo' in modern social Utopias including Marx's proclamation of the imminent end, of the "prehistory of human society" as the result of the dialectics of history, and the ushering in of "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,"7 an age of peace and reconciliation. Yet one can easily make too much of this continuity, for these social conceptions are fundamentally different not only in their this-worldly emphasis but in the central role which they assign to human agency. It is thus misleading to abstract ideas from their historical context as Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren proposed when they sought to find a "nonhistorical" definition that would be valid for the entire history of Western thought.8 Ideas originate within a concrete social, political, and intellectual setting, in part in response to this setting; they are not merely formal concepts but have a specific content that can be understood only with reference to the historical situation. Lucretius' use of the term progredientes has a profoundly different meaning from Condorcet's use of the expression "progress of the human mind." The idea of progress has a specific meaning in the context of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and—to an extent still—the twentieth century which differentiates it essentially from ideas of historical progression in the classical Greek or Roman world or in the Hebraic and Christian traditions. The idea of progress belongs to what has sometimes, but not very accurately, been called the age of the bourgeoisie— not accurately since the bourgeoisie as a cohesive class has never existed and the appeal of the idea went beyond the propertied and educated middle and upper classes to broad portions of the working class. Thus, the idea is part of the outlook of a broad segment of opinion, including many who did not formally expound a philosophy of progress. Its appeal was strongest among those sections of the population—particularly of the intelligentsia—that were interested in the transformation of the economy, society and politics from traditional patterns, dominant in the ancien régime, to modern conditions of growth. The adherents of progress were committed to science, technology, and to a political society, which, at its minimum, guaranteed civil liberties, equality before the law, and the abolition of traditional privilege—if not popular participation in government. T H E E N L I G H T E N M E N T IDEA OF PROGRESS

Several ideas have been central to the emerging philosophies of progress in the eighteenth century since Turgot and Condorcet. One is the concept of the unity of man's history. This involves the conception 7. Karl Marx, "Preface" to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 5; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in Marx-

Engels Reader, p. 491. 8. Mortimer Adler, "Foreword," in Van Doren, Idea of

Progress.

44

GEORG

G.

IGGERS

that civilization is one and universal, that in the place of a variety of separate histories, there emerges one world history. The notion that there is not one history but that the historian tells separate histories was still very much alive in the eighteenth century, even in the monumental Universal History from the Earliest of Time to the Present, thirty-eight volumes published in Great Britain in 1736-1765, which consists of a collection of factual accounts of distinct nations. Even Ranke's first work in 1824 still carries the title Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations.9 Essential to the new conception of a history in the place of histories is the recognition of the role of process and development. There is a central theme to this development, as in Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV: the progressive development of intellect, culture, and society. This awareness of a theme fundamentally changes the character of historical writing and introduces a developmental structure to the great narrative historical writings of the eighteenth century (for example, those by Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon) and distinguishes them from the cumulative approach of much of scholarly historiography until this time. Yet the history of mankind as attempted by Enlightenment historians seldom turns out to be universal history in a true sense, despite the interest of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Schlozer in intercultural comparison. For it is Europe—and this is the second key component of the idea—specifically France and the English-speaking world, which for Voltaire or Condorcet represents the vanguards of civilization. The history of mankind thus becomes identical with the history of Western civilization. Implicit in the idea of progress, in Condorcet but generally also in nineteenth-century ideas of progress (for example, in Hegel, Marx, Comte, and Spencer) is the notion of the civilizing mission of the European nations. A third note, which sharply distinguishes the new kind of history inspired by the idea of progress from older conceptions of Providence, is the recognition that history is the work of men. This idea, that man makes history, that human history is filled with conscious purposes and intents, which distinguishes it from both natural and providential history, is given clear expression for the first time in Vico's New Science (1725), to be sure in the framework of a very different philosophy of history, which saw limited progress followed by decay as part of a recurrent ricorso of slowly upward-moving cycles. The idea that, to quote Marx, "men make their own history" even if "they do not 9. See Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, On The Progress of the Human Mind, trans. McQuilkin De Grange (Hanover, N.H.: Sociological Press, 1929); and AntoineNicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (New York: Noonday Press, 1955). On the conception of "histories" as against one "history," see Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 130-43. On Ranke's conception of world history, see Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Progress in Historiography

and Social

Thought

45

make it just as they please . . . but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past" so that the consequences they intend do not coincide with the consequences which result, is central to the idea of progress in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century form. This makes it possible to understand historical behavior because, unlike natural processes, it is purposive. As Droysen suggested, "there is nothing that moves the human spirit or that has found expression through the senses which cannot be understood." 10 Inextricably linked with the belief in the idea of progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is an optimistic expectation of the society which human reason can and will construct. This expectation is not necessarily millenarian. It can, as in the case of Condorcet, be based on the attainment of limited, but for the most part achievable, goals. There is, to start with, a firm faith in the emancipatory role of science and technology. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, Condorcet's expectations in the scientific, technological, and medical areas appear by no means Utopian. What is problematic are the connections which Condorcet establishes between science and human nature, the possibility through enlightenment, reason, and education of eradicating the manifestations of conflict, particularly war. Indeed, an optimistic conception of man is fundamental to the theories of progress in their classical form. The possibility exists for Turgot, Condorcet, the Saint-Simonians, Comte, Mill, and even Marx of establishing a world society in which the causes of conflict will have been eliminated and the conditions will have been created for a community which through conscious rational planning can get down to the business of achieving advancements in all aspects of life which bear on the fulfillment of the individual. The history of the idea of progress cannot simply be related as a history of ideas, as Bury and Nisbet have done. If it is narrated as a history of ideas, then the question why these ideas changed must be confronted. 11 Nisbet's explanation of the decline of the idea of progress as the consequence of the dissolution of the Judeo-Christian religious heritage requires an explanation why this heritage lost force. The idea of progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot be understood simply as a secularization of a religious outlook. Even if the idea of progress is viewed as the continuation of the idea of Providence in a secular form, the actual political and social content of 10. Karl Marx, " T h e Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Marx-Engels Reader, p. 595; Johann Gustav Droysen, quoted in Iggers, German Conception, p. 110.

11. J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1920; rpt. N e w York: Dover, 1955); Nisbet, History

of the Idea of Progress.

social perspective, see Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress:

For a broadly

History and

Society

(London: Watts, 1968). W . W a r r e n Wagar's Good Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Daruiin to Marcuse (Bioomington: Indiana University Press, 1 9 7 2 ) is perhaps the most comprehensive study of the idea in contemporary social thought, including theology.

46

GEORG

G. I G G E R S

the idea, which is crucial to an understanding of the idea of progress in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contexts, goes far beyond the religious content. It was the rapid changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—scientific advancement, industrial growth, the expansion of European power, the democratization of society—which provided the background for historical optimism; it was the dissolution of nineteenth-century "bourgeois civilization," the discontent and alienation produced by the social concomitants of industrialization, the trauma of two world wars, the political experiences with modern forms of authoritarianism, the decline of Europe which all-in-all determined the decline of the idea of progress more than specifically intellectual developments, such as the growth of historical and cultural relativism. The role of the ideal of progress in eighteenth-century European thought should not be overstressed. Neither should the strength of Enlightenment ideas. T h e eighteenth century was not only the age of Turgot, Lessing, and Adam Smith, it was also the age of Rousseau, John and Charles Wesley, and the Marquis de Sade. Henry Vyverberg and Carlo Antoni have pointed at the deep roots of historical pessimism in eighteenth-century France and the German-speaking world, respectively. 12 Nevertheless, it is in the eighteenth century that for the first time in Western history a pronounced optimism emerges regarding the future of civilization. This optimism does not necessarily entail a schematic philosophy of progress. The future may indeed be open, as for Voltaire, with the possibility and even the likelihood of regression. For him greed and fanaticism are persistent penchants of man, which make unlikely an age of permanent tranquillity devoted to cultural pursuits. Nevertheless, the age of Louis X I V represents for Voltaire a high point in intellectual, artistic, and social achievements. There is a broadly disseminated conviction in the eighteenth century that modern civilization represents not only an advancement over that of the ancients but that it is firmly established, able to resist the challenges from barbarians within and without and open to further development. This note finds expression in Gibbon's firm confidence that modern civilization will not experience a repetition of the fate of ancient Rome; for neither religious obscurantism nor barbarism, the two forces which effected the fall of Rome, continues to hold sway. Nor is Rousseau, as a critic of modern civilization, a historical primitivist. As Vyverberg suggests, the return to nature did not mean for Rousseau a return to an earlier, simpler age—civilization was too firmly established—but rather a recovery of the original nature of man which 12. Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism

in the French Enlightenment

(Cam-

bridge, Mass.: H a r v a r d University Press, 1 9 5 8 ) ; cf. R . V . Sampson, Progress in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: H a r v a r d University Press, 1 9 5 6 ) . On historical pessimism in the nineteenth century, see K o e n r a a d W . Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France ( T h e H a g u e : Martinus Nijhoff, 1 9 6 4 ) . Carlo Antoni, Der Kampf wider die Vernunft (Stuttgart: K . F . K o e h l e r , 1 9 5 1 ) .

Progress in Historiography and Social Thought

47

had been obscured by the artificialities and inequalities of contemporary society. 13 The idea of the unity of the history of man, essential for an explicit theory of progress, finds as yet few exponents in the eighteenth century. But the idea, which goes back to Francis Bacon and René Descartes, that existing conceptions must be questioned and replaced by rationally defensible notions has a broad backing. This rational critique is directed primarily at the remnants of feudal institutions and traditional religion and aims at the reconstitution of society along modern lines, modern in the sense of a society in which capitalist economic activity can function with relatively little restriction by traditional practices and will benefit from the wise regulations of an enlightened administrative state. The different political and economic development in Great Britain, France, and the Germanies determines in each of these areas different notions of the form which economic and social policy should take. While English and particularly Scottish theorists of progress consider a laissez faire capitalist order as normative for the future, German thinkers, such as the Göttingen historian August Ludwig Schlözer, stress the contributions which enlightened bureaucracy can make to removing the obstacles in the way of an expanding economy. 14 In Great Britain explicit theories of progress in the eighteenth century concentrate on the centrality of economics, in France on that of science. In Great Britain, or at least in Scotland, two very different approaches to historical writing coexist—which find parallels in progressivist historical writing on the continent in the nineteenth century —speculative or "conjectural" history on the one hand, narrative developmental history, on the other. John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and in a sense even Adam Smith represent the attempts to write a "conjectural" or "natural" history of mankind, which seeks to establish the laws governing historical development. 15 For them, the pattern of development becomes apparent to the critical philosophic mind. There is a clear gap between this essentially sociologically oriented history, seeking broad generalization and assuming a basic constancy of hu13. See Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em-

pire, 6 vols. (London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1776-1788); cf. Vyverberg,

Historical

Pessimism, pp. 57-61. Cf. also in Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Braziller, 1955), pp. 14-37.

14. Cf. Hans Medick, Naturzustand und Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Gesell-

schaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973). On Schlözer's politics, see Ursula

A.J. Becher, Politische Gesellschaft: Studien zur Genese bürgerlicher

Öffentlichkeit

in Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978); Bernd Warlich, "August Ludwig Schlözer 1735-1809 zwischen R e f o r m und Revolution," dissertation, ErlangenNürnberg, 1972; J o a n Karle, "August Ludwig von Schlözer: An Intellectual Biography," Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1972. 15. J o h n Millar, The Origin of the Distinctions of Ranks (London, 1779); Fergu-

son, An Essay, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of

Nations,

2 vols. (London, 1776); cf. Forbes, ed., "Introduction," p. xxii.

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man nature, and a historiography which builds on the careful examination of sources. Representatives of the latter, such as Hume and Robertson, may be informed by a general optimism about the course of British history, but they cannot embrace a philosophy of progress that sees history as an ascending whole. For the "conjectural" historians, history can be written even if documents are lacking because the pattern of historical development is known. In this vein, the SaintSimonians wrote half a century later that even if hard information is missing, "it can be affirmed in advance" what the course of, for example, Indian history was. "We do not even hesitate to say that the Europeans alone are able to teach the Indians their own history."16 For Millar, Ferguson, and Smith, economic factors are decisive. All human societies follow the same pattern—for Smith under the pressure of population growth—from nomadic, to pastoral and agricultural and commercial economies. The establishment of economic laissez faire and liberal representative institutions are the political concomitants of this development. Duncan Forbes, the editor of Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), stressed that the Scots were no unqualified advocates of progress, that Ferguson remained aware that every stage of human history was able to achieve a standard of happiness which was neither superior nor inferior to that of other stages, and that the wealth and luxury of modern societies had not only its beneficient but also its destructive side.17 Nevertheless, they perceived a persistent development toward a more complex, prosperous, and liberal society. For the French, the emphasis rested on science rather than on economics. Scientific development, however, did not necessarily spell out social or moral progress. The idea of scientific progress was thus given expression in the seventeenth century by Pascal, who, committed to a theological notion of the limitations of man's nature, regarded the prospects of mankind skeptically. There could be no finality of scientific knowledge for Pascal since scientific knowledge continuously corrected itself. Certain of the philosopbes, convinced of the potential goodness of man, believed in the applicability of a "moral and political science" to the problems of society. Turgot, in his Second Sorbonne "Discourse on the Successive Progresses of the Human Mind" (1750), established such a relationship but with qualifications. In contrast to nature, which is subject to constant law, the realm of man is marked by diversity and confusion. Nevertheless, out of the chaos progress emerges as the human mind passes from religious superstition to metaphysics and finally to a scientific explanation of reality. Social progress lagged behind intellectual progress. Indeed the passions of men—unreason and injustice—provided a part of the dynamics which 16. The Doctrine of Saint-Simon. An Exposition. First Year 1828-1829, 2nd ed., trans, and ed. Georg G. Iggers (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), p. 37n. 17. Forbes, ed., "Introduction," p. xiv.

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made for upward development toward the final stage when "Commerce and politics will unify at last all parts of the globe." 18 Progress was certain but precarious. Like Voltaire, Turgot believed that it was constantly threatened by forces of irrationality which sought to interrupt and reverse it. Much more confident, Isaac Iselin from Basel in his Uber die Gescbichte der Menschheit (1764) (On the History of Mankind) undertook to write the history of mankind as the progressive triumph of human reason over ignorance and irrationality, a process in which industry and trade would eliminate poverty, crime, and war. 19 In even more heightened form this confidence marked the Marquis de Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, written in 1794 while Condorcet was in hiding from the Committee of Public Safety. Condorcet was convinced that it was possible to construct a science of society with direct applications to social policy. Condorcet set out to "demonstrate how nature has joined together indissolubly the progress of knowledge and that of liberty, virtue and respect for the natural rights of man." "All errors in politics and morals," he asserted, "are based on philosophical error and these in turn are connected with scientific errors." Thus, social science provided the basis for a rational political order. This order, in turn, would lay the foundation for a society marked by steady growth in technology and subsequent improvements not only in material standards of living and health but also in social relations. Social and economic inequalities would be minimized by equal educational opportunities, equal rights for women, humane treatment of prisoners, and, finally, the end of war after the establishment of a world federation. "The sun [would then] shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason." 20 The progress of civilization would be universal, but the bearer of progress would be Europe, specifically the peoples of France, Great Britain, and the United States. The nonEuropean world would be freed from colonial control and economic exploitation as free trade replaced government monopolies. "HISTORISM" A N D T H E N I N E T E E N T H CENTURY

This a priori history which foresaw a pattern for historical development universally was questioned by a broad current of opinion that stressed the uniqueness of historical development. We shall call this current of opinion historism (Historismus). 2i A discussion of historism belongs in an essay on the history of the idea of progress because despite surface differences, it shares basic assumptions of the idea of progress and, in turn, introduces conceptions of growth and develop18. Turgot, Progress of the Human Mind, p. 519. Isaak Iselin, Uber die Geschichte der Menschheit (Frankfurt: J.H. Harscher, 1764). 20. Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture, pp. 163, 179. 21. See Georg G. Iggers, "Historicism," in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner, 1973), II, 456-64.

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ment that are fundamental in the transformation of progressivist thought in the nineteenth century. A variety of eighteenth-century historians coming from different theoretical directions share certain of the assumptions of historism—Vico, Montesquieu, Moser, Herder, W. von Humboldt, Edmund Burke, and, in a certain sense, also Hume. These historians and social theorists reject the attempt to apply a theory of stages to history, as Ferguson, Turgot, and Condorcet had attempted; they stress the specific character of each society and link this character to the unique history of the society. They may, as in the case 6f Montesquieu, 22 combine an attempt to isolate general factors which affect all societies—geography, climate, etc.—with a specific spirit that has its source in the unique traditions of the society. Historistic conceptions of society often view the societies as organic analogies. A society possesses a spirit which gives it unity and which gives every individual, every idea, and every institution in it its character. Historism often involves a political ethos different from that of progressivist thought. It stresses the diversity of cultures and within each culture the diversity of stations in life. It has a much more positive relation to existing social, political, and cultural institutions and is more likely to affirm the status quo. While Montesquieu stresses a rigorous empirical approach in the study of institutions, the German thinkers, such as Moser, Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, proceeding from a much more idealistic epistemology, wish to understand the culture through empathy (Einfühlung). Yet despite these marked differences from the idea of progress, historism functions in an intellectual world that has many common characteristics with the idea of progress. It too believes in growth and transformation. Conservative in certain aspects, it is not necessarily reactionary when turned to the past. It sees history in terms of linear development. In the nineteenth century, historism is often identified with a narrowing of the historical focus on the nation state; in the Enlightenment setting historism is broadly cosmopolitan and culture-oriented. Thus, Herder undertakes a history of the human race. Instead of progressive development to a higher stage, history fulfills itself for him in the inexhaustibility of the cultures which manifest themselves through time. There is indeed a purpose to world history, but it is not found in the progressive perfection of man. T h e intent of history is rather for all energies to express and develop their unique character. This perception involves an immense optimism regarding the benign function of history. History is the source of knowledge, morality, and culture. T h e purpose of historical study is the widening of man's humanity. Truth, values, and beauty are not one but many. They are found only in history and manifest themselves in concrete national forms. T h e fullest development of man's humanity requires his immersion into the diversity of cultures. 23 22. Montesquieu, Spirit

of the Laws, 2 vols., trans. T h o m a s N u g e n t ( N e w Y o r k :

Colonial Press, 1 9 0 0 ) .

23. See Johann Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie

der Geschichte

der

Menschheit

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There is relatively little space for evil in this view of history. Every age must be understood in its own terms and judged by its own standards. This does not exclude political criticism. The historistic standpoint is particularly well represented in the smaller states of Germany and the Swiss cantons, where traditional corporative institutions still maintain themselves and historical arguments are used against the encroachments of bureaucratic absolutism. But the thinkers who represent a more modern and libertarian orientation such as Herder and, a generation later, Wilhelm von Humboldt, also draw on concrete historical rather than on abstract natural law arguments as they envisage a state closely tied to popular culture. 24 T h e French Revolution both strengthened optimistic expectations and undercut the basic assumptions on which these expectations rested. The enthusiasm with which broad segments of middle- and upperclass opinion received the events of 1789 turned into horror once the revolution, in its terroristic and military phase, radically questioned the established order. T h e French Revolution, which set out to apply rational principles to the transformation of state and society, took on the appearance of an uncontrollable force of nature. In the nineteenth century, basic concepts of historism were integrated into the dominant ideas of progress. Conscious human action was now no longer seen as the decisive agent of historical change. History possessed a logic and dynamic of its own. T h e course of history was not determined by the conscious actions of men; rather, these actions led to unintended results. From historism, those committed to the ideas of progress also accepted the organic conception of society. Large social groupings, nations or classes, with roots in history, formed the units of history. These units possessed a structure and a spirit. History alone became the key to the understanding of things human. Yet in contrast to the historistic conception that history was fulfilled in every culture and every age, the theories of progress assumed an upward development, generally toward a final society, in which reason would find its fulfillment in concrete social institutions. For Hegel, history was thus the march of reason in history leading to a political organization in which man could find his fullest development. Hegel's conception of the free—that is, rational—society reflected the political and social condi-

(1789-1791); English: Outlines of a Philosophy

of the History

of Man, trans. T.

Churchill (New York: Bergman, 1966), and Reflections of the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, abridged, ed. Frank Manuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1968). Also Johann Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774), and Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (1793-1797), all in

Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877-1913). See also Wilhelm von Humboldt, "On the Historian's Task," History and Theory, 6 (1967): 57-71. 24. See Antoni, Der Kampf. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen," in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: B. Behr, 1903-1936), 1.

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tions of early nineteenth century Germany, in particular of the Prussia after the reforms of the Stein and Hardenberg eras, in which a modern capitalistic society, freed from feudal and corporatistic restraints, functioned freely under the protection of a benevolent bureaucratic order. 25 Progress thus found its fulfillment in the peculiar Prussian settlement of a bourgeois society operating under the aegis of an enlightened constitutional monarchy. Reason found its expression, not in scientific planning and the attempts consciously to control and guide society on the basis of scientific insights, but rather in the "recognition of [historical] necessity," of the inevitability with which history, utilizing law but not governed by the actions of men, moved inexorably to its historical fulfillment. By contrast, in France and Great Britain, and to a lesser extent in Germany, the ideal of a scientifically planned society lived on. Men indeed did not control their past but were the instruments by which society moved to rational foundations. However, the point was, according to Marx, approaching when "the prehistory of human society [is] coming to a close" and, according to Engels, when the whole sphere of the conditions which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organization. T h e laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. T h e conception of the political structure of this society controlled by man differed widely. For Comte and to an extent the Saint-Simonians, an elite of scientists would obtain authority over the material and cultural destinies of the population; for Spencer government would increasingly yield to the free play of enlightened economic interests; for Marx and Engels after a transitory period of proletarian dictatorship, "the public power will lose its political character" and the state wither away. T h e idea that "all traces of government disappear," according to Proudhon, and the "government of m e n " be replaced by "the administration of things," according to Saint-Simon, in a world without coercion recurs in early and mid-nineteenth century progressivist thought. 2 6 25. Georg Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Wiley, 1900); Georg Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 26. Marx, "Preface," p. 5; Friedrich Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," in Marx-Engels Reader, p. 715; Marx and Engels, "Manifesto," p. 490; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century," in The Great Political Theories, ed. Michael Curtis (New York: Avon, 1962), p. 135,Doctrine

of Saint-Simon, p. xxi.

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Despite the fundamentally different conceptions of the political organization of the future, ranging from autocratic rule by scientifically informed elites to the abolition of traditional political constraints, there is a considerable area of common ground among these doctrines of progress in the affirmation of values to be recognized in history. For Comte, Mill, Buckle, Spencer and also Marx, Condorcet's vision of the future, rooted in the Enlightenment, remains decisive, even if the mechanism by which this vision becomes reality places much greater emphasis on collective forces and historical processes than on intellectual leadership. The entire history of the world points to the achievement of a civilization in which science and industry occupy a central role in the transformation of the conditions of human life. The military repressive patterns of the past will be replaced by the peaceful, productive order of the future. T h e entire history of mankind finds its culmination in the history of modern Europe. This confidence in the leadership of Europe is shared by Hegel and by German idealist philosophers like Fichte, who, perhaps reflecting the delayed economic and social modernization of Germany, places less emphasis on science and technology. The non-European world will find the completion of its historical development not in the further development of its own heritage but, because its heritage represents an earlier phase in the progress of mankind, in total Europeanization. For the majority of nineteenth-century theorists of progress, it is conflict which provides the mechanism by which the onward march of mankind proceeds. T h e Enlightenment idea that intellectual discussion itself provides a major source of the civilizational advancement of modern man is reiterated in the liberalism of John Stuart Mill. But Mill, in his stress on rational dialogue, is somewhat of an exception. For Hegel, Comte, Marx, and Spencer, the rational order of the future is achieved in part unwittingly by the irrational forces of the past. There is no room for fundamental evil in the economy of history; coercion, exploitation, and warfare have thus contributed to their own elimination. The implication is that individuals and whole ages were sacrificed on "the slaughter bank of history" for the redemption of mankind. Conflict took a variety of forms. For Hegel, as also for Kant, war played a decisive role as the ultimate arbiter in the dialectical confrontation of states, as the concrete manifestation of an ascending succession of philosophic principles. War and the conflict of states remained for Hegel (but not for Kant) a desirable agent of progress also in the future. For the Saint-Simonians and Comte, "organic" epochs, marked by unanimity in basic beliefs and the presence of a centralizing authority providing social cohesion, alternated with "critical" epochs in which individualism and skeptical inquiry dissolved the incomplete unity of the past to provide the possibility of a new, more comprehensive synthesis. For Marx and Engels the agency of human emancipation

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was the class struggle; for Spencer it was the competition of the marketplace, with its survival of the fittest. The belief in finality and the role of conflict in attaining this finality contained the seed of a political attitude that was willing to sacrifice the individual for an idea. From a libertarian perspective, Proudhon sensed this well when in his Philosophie du Progrès he warned against any identification of progress with an absolute end. Progress, Proudhon insisted, is "the affirmation of universal movement, consequently the negation of any static form or formula." 27 Mill questioned the possibility of progress as a "natural law." At most, limited "empirical laws" might be formulated which would describe "certain general tendencies which may be perceived in society," such as the replacement of a military society by an industrial one. Moreover, even if the laws of social change were known, it would not follow that changes were necessarily in a desirable direction. Although Mill shared the belief that "the general tendency is, and will continue to be, saving occasional and temporary exceptions, one of improvement: a tendency toward a better and a happier state," he nevertheless acknowledged, "that progress was not inevitable but the result of conscious human effort based on rational insight." This left the door open to the possibility of real regression. 28 From the perspective of the new "scientific" historiography which emerged in the nineteenth-century German university, the speculative approach to history, represented by the theorists of progress, was, of course, unacceptable. Ranke rejected the idea of progress on two counts. For one, neglecting a critical examination of the sources, it lacked a scholarly or "scientific" basis. For the other, as we suggested at the beginning of this essay, it violated the historian's sense of the uniqueness of the historical phenomenon. The historian deals with every historical manifestation as something nonreproducible, as an end in itself. For him "every epoch is immediate to God" 29 and must be judged in terms of its own standards. "While the philosopher, viewing history from his vantage point, seeks infinity merely in progression, development, and totality, history recognizes something infinite in every existence, in every condition, in every being, something eternal, coming from God." Yet in this assertion of the ultimate value of every individuality, Ranke in turn occupies a speculative position. Ranke assumed that there is fundamental purpose in history even if this purpose does not express itself in directional movement. Thus, the perfection of history is expressed at every moment in time. This form of historism expresses a historical optimism more radical in a sense than the classical theories of progress. For while the theories of 27. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Philosophie du progrès (Paris: M. Rivière, 1946), p. 49; the English translation is mine. 28. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, 7th ed. (London: Longman's, 1868), II, 510, 497. 29. Ranke, "On Progress in History," p. 53.

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progress assume that the present represents a point, often marked by dissent and exploitation, to be overcome in a higher stage, the Rankean form of historism suggests that the high point of history has already been attained. Politically, this position implies an acceptance and affirmation of the status quo. In Ranke's words, "it recognizes the beneficient, the existing, and opposes change which negates the existing."30 In Ranke's historical writing, this optimism in fact moved close to an affirmation of progress. Notwithstanding his assertion that "all epochs are immediate to God," he distinguished between Western history, which alone he considered to be of world-historical significance, and that of the non-European world. While Hegel still assigned to China and India—in contrast to Africa, which in his opinion had no history—important roles in the early chapters of a world history leading to the modern Germanic world, Ranke denied that these peoples, to whom "we can devote but scant attention," had a history at all. "Their condition," he commented, "is rather a matter for natural history."31 For Ranke, world history was the history of the making of modern Europe. Indeed, his entire historical work—from his early study of the emergence of the modern state system in 1824 to his World History written in his old age—is devoted to the historical foundations of modern Europe. Despite theoretical assertions to the contrary, there is an explicit theory of progress contained in his history. The theme is the rise and success of the Protestant principle of secular government in the German and the English worlds. Reflecting on the peculiar circumstances in Germany, in which effective limitations had been set to liberal forms, Ranke saw a modern conservative principle assert itself successfully against the revolutionary threat of French ideology. This emphatic endorsement of nineteenth-century Europe recurs in much of historical scholarship in the nineteenth century. The idea of progress is seldom asserted; yet it is implicit in the national traditions of historical writing in Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States. Generally affirmative of the course of development in their particular nation-states, these writers see in their national histories a progression toward a state of benefit to their own nation and exemplary to the rest of the Western world. With nuances which reflect different political constellations in the respective countries—the Prussian school in Germany, the Macaulay and the Whig interpretation in Great Britain, Bancroft and the democratic orientation, as well as the later Anglo-Saxon school in America; Thierry, Guizot, and Michelet in France—all give expression to a historical optimism which sees in the 30. Leopold von Ranke, "On the Character of Historical Science," in his Theory and Practice, p. 38. 31. Ibid., p. 46.

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modern European and North American world the highpoint of progress achieved to this point with the prospects favorable to further advancement. 32 This optimism was radically questioned by a small minority of historians and social theorists who questioned the assumptions as regards value upon which historical writing, both progressivist and historistic, rested. Involved was a rejection or at least a critique of the tendencies which appeared to dominate in nineteenth-century civilization, the development of science, technology, production, and the expansion of democracy identified with bourgeois culture. Only in isolated instances did this critique come from the Left. 33 For the most part, socialist thought affirmed the economic and even political values of the "bourgeoisie" and wanted to make the benefits of modern civilization accessible to the working masses. The critique came from an intellectual elite, which sought to rescue an aristocratic culture from the vulgarization of a mercantile age. An early expression of this radical critique was contained in the writings of Jakob Burckhardt in the 1860s and 1870s. Burckhardt took to task "the arrogant belief in the moral superiority of the present." "Morality as a power," he wrote, "stands no higher, nor is there more of it, than in the so-called barbarous times." "Even progress in intellectual development is open to doubt since, as civilization advanced, the division of labor may have steadily narrowed the consciousness of the individual." The notion that there is continuity and growth in history is to be denied. T h e chronological approach, which underlies not only the philosophies of history but almost all historical writing and which "regards the past as a contrast and a preliminary stage of our own time" must give way to a study of the "recurrent, constant and typical." Much more honestly than Ranke, Burckhardt embraces the historistic position that an epoch be studied for its own worth. This calls for a history which, unlike the conventional narrative history, does not follow progressions of a selected theme through time but takes "transverse sections of history," such as the Italian Renaissance, "in as many directions as possible." 3 4 Time thus stands still. T h e Renaissance is regarded not as a link in a chain but as a unique and one-time expression of the human spirit. A new criterion emerges for what is historically interesting, and this criterion is determined by values which move essentially counter to the popular aspirations of the century. The Enlightenment vision of a world, which provides security and comfort for all, is abrogated for 32. On nineteenth-century historians, see George P. Gooch, History in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1 9 5 9 ) .

and

Historians

33. Georges Sorel, The Illusions of Progress, trans. J o h n Stanley and Charlotte Stanley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 9 6 9 ) . 34. Jakob Burckhardt, "Reflections o n H i s t o r y , " in his The Civilization of the

Renaissance in Italy and Other Selections, ed. Alexander Dru (New York: Washington

Square Press, 1 9 6 6 ) , pp. 4 6 , 5, 30.

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one in which heroic qualities survive. Despite his fear of mass outbursts of the "terribles simplificateurs" and of modern militarism, Burckhardt, like Nietzsche, underestimated the reservoir of violence stored up in the modern world. There is a glorification of struggle. "Evil," he writes, "is assuredly a part of the great economy of world history. It is force, the right of the stronger over the weaker, prefigured in that struggle for life which fills all nature . . . and is carried on in the early stages of humanity by murder and robbery, by the eviction, extermination or enslavement of weaker races, or of weaker peoples within the same race, of weaker states, of weaker classes within the same state and people," 35 which makes history. Burckhardt emphatically takes morality out of history. On the surface, this stress on struggle, on the survival of the stronger, reminds one of Darwinism. Yet the linear development, the belief that conflict leads to the selection of higher cultures, is radically rejected by a conception which denies the part of direction. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth, there was an increasing sense that there were forces of history at work over which man had no control. The conditions of modern life called forth an ambiguous response from a growing number of social theorists and historians. They agreed that an increasing area of human relations had come under rational control, but rationality was no longer seen as a positive force. If for the thinkers of the Enlightenment reason had been normative in character and had fulfilled a liberating and emancipatory function, reason now was seen as a value-free abstraction, which was applied to control nature and manipulate men for irrational ends. Reason became an instrument of domination. Very early in the nineteenth century, not only conservative Christian thinkers—Novalis, Adam Muller, Louis de Bonald, and Joseph de Maistre—but also socialists such as the Saint-Simonians saw in the dissemination of reason and enlightenment a cause of the fragmentation of society and of the dissolution of common values. For Marx and Engels, but not only for them, the liberation of the economy from a traditional economic order "left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.'" 36 But it was less the working class that felt this sense of alienation than a cultural elite, which in a period of rapid industrialization saw its preeminence threatened by what it conceived to be the expansion of a mass culture and a mass society. Ferdinand Tonnies observed the dissolution of Gemeinschaft ("community") into a fragmented Gesellschaft ("society"); Emile Durkheim described the structure of modern society as one of anomie, a condition of relative normlessness, in 35. Ibid, p. 98. 36. Marx and Engels, "Manifesto," p. 475.

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which individuals were isolated as common goals vanished. Much of this cultural pessimism was built on a class bias, which failed to take into account the positive aspects of modernization: the increase of education, cultural consciousness, and political responsibility among the broad segments of the working population mobilized by these economic transformations. But the catastrophe of the First World War and the subsequent emergence of efficient authoritarian regimes purportedly based on mass movements intensified the conviction that the development of modern civilization, with its reliance on science and technology and the mobilization of all segments of the population, led inexorably to deterioration of the human condition. In 1872, the Grand Larousse du XlXe Steele, only a year after the French national debacle of 1870-1871, could note that virtually all intelligent men now accepted the idea; and Bury could still write in 1920 that "we are so conscious of constantly progressing that we look upon progress as an a i m . . . which it only depends on our effort and good will to achieve". 37 Yet few non-Marxist social theorists or historians in 1980, at a point when many of Condorcet's predictions have been fulfilled, not only in the scientific and technological but also in the social sphere, would still admit the validity of the idea. Nevertheless, there are marked similarities between modern theories of social development and classical ideas of progress. Three ideas are basic to the classical idea of progress: the incessant growth of scientific knowledge and technological control, the transformation of society from an order of privilege to an order of meritocracy, and the extension of these modern forms of civilization over the universe. All three recur in modern theories of modernization and of industrial society. But what has fundamentally changed is the conception of the basic goodness or malleability of human nature. In its place there enters a recognition of the destructive and aggressive aspects of man. Kant and Hegel were aware of these, but they were convinced that they fitted into the economy of history, into the cunning of reason, which always, like Goethe's Mephistopheles, "wills evil but creates good." Yet this faith in an economy of history collapses. In a world in which the drive to power is ineradicable, science and technology lose their emancipatory function and become instruments of control. Before the ecological and resource crises of the late twentieth century, few social theorists foresaw limits to material growth, but they recognized the ambiguities of progress. There is a readiness to recognize the direction of development predicted by the theorists of progress and yet to reverse the scale of values they posited. Alexis de Tocqueville saw and hailed the steady 37. Ferdinand Tonnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963); Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson ( N e w York: Free Press, 1951); Bury, Idea of Progress, pp. 1-2.

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advance of equality but, like Mill, discovered danger in its potential power to destroy individuality, foster conformity, favor authoritarian control, and open the doors to new kinds of fanaticized, ideologically directed violence. There is an ambiguity written into Social Darwinist conceptions of progress, which, particularly in their continental forms, for example, Ludwig Gumplowicz, see struggle and violence as necessary elements of progress and thus as ends as well as means. Spencer's optimism turns in the 1880s to a stark pessimism as he witnesses the militarization of the modern states. The vision of the progressivist thinkers of a world marked by prosperity, a sense of security, and peace, is negated and replaced by one in which struggle and heroism are valued. Burckhardt, like Nietzsche, derides the search for "happiness"—"we should try to rid the life of nations entirely of the word 'happiness' and recognize that 'natural history' shows us a fearful struggle for life." "A people actually feels its full strength as a people only in war." The réévaluation of values finds its extreme expression in Spengler's identification of rationality, productivity, humaneness, and humanity as the values of a decadent "civilization" to be replaced by the heroic values of discipline, struggle, and war. 38 Perhaps one of the best examples of an acute awareness of the ambiguities of the idea of progress is contained in the historical thought of Max Weber. History, or at least the history of the West since Hebrew times, is the scene of the unfolding of reason in time, but in a very different sense from that of Condorcet or Hegel, each of whom envisaged history as the irresistible march of reason. For Weber, the driving force in the Western world in the areas of intellect, social organization, and economics is the accelerating transformation of all aspects of life along rational lines. But reason has lost its normative value and has become a purely abstract instrumentality, free of any inherent value, for the control of the world in the service of irrational ends. For no rational standards can be applied to the selection of values; rationality enters only in examining the inner consistency of these values and in the determination of means by which the desired ends can be attained. Weber projects a grand scheme of modernization, in which he sees all Western societies move forward along similar lines, only partially modified by different historical traditions. For Weber, as for the classical theorists of progress from Condorcet to Marx, the history of the West becomes ultimately the history of the non-West, as the West extends its hegemony over the world. In the realm of intellect, the history of the West since Egyptian times, but with increasing speed in the modern period, is the history of scientifi38. See, e.g., Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French

Revolution,

trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N . Y . : Doubleday, 1955), particularly the passage on the new mad men, p. 157, and Chap. 8, pp. 203-11. Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1940); Burckhardt, "Reflections of History," pp. 96, 50; Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols., trans. Charles F. Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1932).

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cation, a process which marks not only growing understanding for purposes of control and manipulation of the forces of nature and to an extent society but also a destruction of old illusions and therewith "the disenchantment of the world" 59 and a recognition of the lack of rational foundation of the traditional values that have informed the society. In the economic realm, the process of "rationalization" and "intellectualization" leads to an exclusion of older moral concerns and the emergence of an ethos, at first religiously motivated, which sees man's calling as maximum production, production for its own sake. In modern society, growth becomes an imperative, an irresistible force "until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt." 40 The cult of efficiency calls for rational social and political control, the elimination of the personal factor and the increasing establishment of impersonal regulation by means of a bureaucracy. Resistance to the imposition of an iron cage may occur; the nonrational exerts itself momentarily through the charismatic effect of great individuals who go against the stream. But their impact too is ultimately "routinized." Not all theories of modernization come to these pessimistic conclusions. In the Western as well as in the socialist countries and in the Third World, ideas in many ways akin to the classical idea of progress remain influential in the post-World War II era. In the West these ideas have been linked to the concept of "industrial society," in the socialist countries to that of the "scientific and technological revolution." In a host of writings, in various countries, J. Fourastie in France, Hans Freyer in West Germany, Walt Rostow in the United States, Georg Klaus in the German Democratic Republic, and Radovan Richta and a host of coworkers in an ambitious cooperative project at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences offer what the last calls "an entirely new, optimistic view of the future."41 The basis is laid for a science of the future. The Western formulation of this conception of progress is perhaps most forcefully expressed in Walt Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth. Marx's assertion that there are laws of social development "working with iron necessities toward inevitable results" so that "the country which is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed the image of its own future"42 is here given a new, capitalist expression. A technological determinism operates here, dif39. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 139, 155. 40. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), p. 181. 41. Radovan Richta and a research team, Civilization at the Cross Roads: Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution (Prague: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1969), p. 11. 42. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Karl Marx, "Preface to the First German Edition," Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 8.

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ferent from the more broadly social conception of historical change in the Marxist doctrine of economic determination. T h e British and the American experience of transformation, through a series of five stages from traditional economies to mature capitalism and mass consumption, stands as the model for other societies including the Soviet Union. Communism appears as a deviation, as "a disease of transition," 4 3 which under the pressures of economic development will give way to the social and political concomitants of an affluent consumer society, to a convergence with other highly developed societies. T h e pressure of development has already led to the "end of ideologies," to the "consensus" of the post-World War II generation of optimistic historians on the American national past. 44 T h e Marxist formulations of the "scientific technological" revolution, optimistic formulations restricted to Eastern European countries and largely absent from the much more flexible thought of Western Marxists, give greater emphasis to the social effects of industrialization. For them too "the scientific and technological revolution" provides the basis for an unalienated, perfected society. "Only when the productive forces of human life have reached this level," observes the Richta group, "will opportunities exist for new relationships among people and a new concept of human life. W e are standing today on the soil of the historically formed industrial civilization, but we are beginning to cross its frontiers and go forward into the unknown civilization of the future." 45 This stress on the uniformity of economic development is questioned by Alexander Gerschenkron, who stresses the unique historical factors which determine the economic takeoff to industrialization in specific national settings. T h e unequal economic development of countries at the verge of industrialization prevents a repetition of the British model. In a study of political modernization, Barrington Moore introduces a similar comparative note; differences in social relations related to economic modernization explain the very different roads that the various major national societies took. Raymond Aron accepts the notion of the "industrial society" with its imperative of maximum production, which calls forth uniform forms of control yet which runs into the barriers of societies and individuals whose character has been formed by history. 46 Cultural and national diversity continues to exist under the veneer of technologically conditioned uniformity. 43. Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth, pp. 162-64. 44. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideologies: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, I960); cf. Bernard Sternsher, Consensus, Conflict, and American Historians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975); also John Higham, "The Cult of American Consensus': Homogenizing Our History,'' Commentary, 27 (February 1959): 93-100. 45. Richta et al., Civilization at the Crossroads, p. 278. 46. A. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); Barrington Moore, Social Origins of

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Yet these varied critiques still proceed from the assumption that industrialization and growth are the destiny of the modern world. A more radical critique takes issue with the fundamental value assumptions of an industrial society. From a fictional perspective, Julian Huxley and George Orwell stress the tendencies to domination inherent in technical rationality. Basic to the Judeo-Christian and the Hellenic-Roman tradition is the faith that the world was given to man to control. From two very different directions, one neo-Marxist, the other structuralist-anthropological, the relationship of man to nature is called into question. In his early philosophical writings as well as in Capital, Marx had spoken of the "complete inversion" in the relation between the world of things and the world of man. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno see a similar inversion operating in modern society since the Enlightenment but see it not as a function of private property but as an inherent quality of scientific-technical civilization. Seeking to emancipate man from myth, they argue, the Enlightenment created a new myth. It assumed that thought could best be expressed in mathematical forms and in doing this created a conceptual world in which men were depersonalized. Rationalization and mathematization lent themselves to the manipulation of men in the service of production for its own ends. "Mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." 47 Going beyond this, Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown question the very compulsion to produce.48 In changing the relationship between man and nature and seeking technical control over the latter, Western civilization laid the bases for the manipulation and control of human beings. The drive to perform, in industry or sexuality, represents a neurosis. The civilization of the West is thus inherently sick. In a Utopian vein, Marcuse sees in the dialectics of industrial society the possibility but improbability that the achievement of an automated industry will free man from the traditional economy of scarcity and the curse of alienated labor and make possible a world in which the pleasure principle will no longer be in conflict with the reality principle. This attempt to redefine man's relation to nature 49 and thus to question the fundamental value assumptions of Western civilization, and with it the ideology of progress, is expressed in a different form in structural anthropology. Claude Lévi-Strauss questions the unique role of scientific reason as it has been conceived in the Western tradition of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Raymond Aron, Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 221. 47. Cf. Marx, Capital, I, 310; Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), p. xi. 48. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), and One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (New York: Vintage, n.d.). 49. Cf. William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: Braziller, 1972).

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philosophy since the Greeks. The mythical and magical thinking of the "savage mind" possesses an equal dignity in its attempt to understand reality. "Mythical" and "scientific" thought do not represent "two stages or phases in the evolution of knowledge. Both approaches are equally valid." Nor is there continuity or process in time. Modern civilization does not represent a higher form of social life; historical knowledge has no claim to superiority over other forms of knowledge. "History is a discontinuous set." It has no objective subject matter. "We need only recognize that history is a method with no distinct object corresponding to it to reject the equivalence between the notion of history and the notion of humanity."50 A very similar idea is suggested by Michel Foucault.51 It is only in one specific period of Western history that men have thought in historical terms. This way of thinking represented an anthropocentric hubris, which gave man a special and illusory status in reality and destroyed the balance between man and nature. But Foucault agrees with Lévi-Strauss that this "golden age of historical consciousness," which marked the world outlook of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, "has already passed."52 In his early work on the history of insanity in the Age of Reason, 53 Foucault had tried to demonstrate the inhumanity of an outlook which seeks to dominate and regulate, in this case the insane, with no understanding of the creative and humane sources of madness. This attempt at a history, which fundamentally questions the assumptions of historical writing since the eighteenth century of the unity of world history—the notion of development as the framework for historical thought, the special dignity of intellect, and the unique quality of European civilization—is perhaps best represented by the historians and "human scientists" of the Annales circle in Paris, although the work of the Annales finds its parallel in the historical writing of almost all countries by the 1970s. 54 It is here that a Copernican view of history, for which rational man no longer occupies the center of the stage and Europe appears as one among many cultures, replaces an anthropo- and Europocentric conception. The denial of the unity of world history is not unique. A tradition from Herder 50. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 259, 263. 51. Cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971), and The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A . M . Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 52. Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, p. 254. 53. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1964). 54. Cf. Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, N . Y . : Cornell University Press, 1 9 7 6 ) ; J. H. Hexter, "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," Journal of Modern History, 4 4 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 4 8 0 - 5 3 9 ; Georg G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), pp. 4 3 - 7 9 .

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through Lasaulx, Danilevski, Brooks Adams, Spengler, and Toynbee 55 has stressed the diversity of cultures and developments. But all of these perceptions still stressed the developmental unity of each culture and saw the culture in an idealistic manner in terms of an underlying spirit. Two ideas are radically questioned by many of the historians of the Annales circle. One is the concept of development. Fernand Braudel challenges not only the idea of a continuous development in the unit under investigation—in his treatment of the Mediterranean seen as a geographic historic region or in his survey of the entire world between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries—but the idea of the unity of the time. There is not one history of a region, a society, or the world but a variety of histories, a variety of times running parallel to each other but not necessarily integrated. 56 The geographical time of the longue durée moves alongside the relatively slow transformations of social and economic structures and cultural patterns and the rapid time of political events. For Braudel, as for Lévi-Strauss, history "is not t i e d . . . to any particular object" but "consists wholly in its method." 57 It is important, however, that it is not the realms alone in which consciousness is decisive—culture, politics, or even economics—which are of historical interest, but the broad areas of human existence: the material, biological, and routine everyday activities of human beings. Like the anthropologist, the historian is interested less in the realm of conscious ideas than in "decoding" the pattern of automatic behavior hidden in all phases of life. The link between man and nature is reestablished. This search for history which is synchronic rather than diachronic, which does not move, an histoire immobile, finally leads to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's retrospective anthropology in his attempt to grasp the pattern of life in a remote fourteenth-century village in the Pyrenees. 58 Thus, the idea of progress has run its course in social thought and historiography, but not quite. In two important senses the idea of progress continues to be of relevance to social thought and historiography today: in its contribution to the analysis of the modern industrial age and as a norm for social policy and action. Notwithstanding the 55. Cf. G e o r g G. Iggers, " T h e Idea of P r o g r e s s in R e c e n t Philosophy of H i s t o r y , " Journal of Modern History, 30 (1958): 215-26. 56. See the following works by F e r n a n d Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Sian Reynolds ( N e w Y o r k : H a r p e r & R o w , 1 9 7 3 ) ; Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVèmeXVIIlème siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: A r m a n d Colin, 1 9 7 9 ) ; Capitalism and Material Life, trans. M i r i a m K o c h a n ( N e w Y o r k : H a r p e r & R o w , 1 9 7 3 ) ; and " T i m e , History, and the Social Sciences," in The Varieties of History, ed. Fritz Stern ( N e w Y o r k : Vintage, 1 9 7 2 ) , pp. 4 0 3 - 2 9 . 57. Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, p. 2 6 2 . 58. Cf. E m m a n u e l Le Roy Ladurie, "L'histoire immobile," Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 2 9 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 6 7 3 - 9 2 ; E m m a n u e l Le R o y Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray ( N e w Y o r k : Vintage, 1 9 7 9 ) .

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admonitions of the structuralist anthropologists, who are not entirely free of an element of nostalgic romanticism, the modern world is the central historical experience of our existence. This modern world is fundamentally different from all other civilizations and cultures, and this difference rests on its progressive character. Modern society has been one of growth. This growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has affected the entire world so that one can speak for the first time of a world history. Only in the affluent nations of the West has the desirability of growth been seriously questioned, and even here it remains an integral part of public policy. This growth has never been purely material but has had consequences for all aspects of society. History as retrospective anthropology has its charm. It also serves the important function of protecting us against a parochialism which takes modern industrial society as its norm. But it does not replace a study of such a society. And such a study must work with concepts of dynamic change. T h e idea of progress in its Enlightenment form represented the first theory of modernization. Admittedly, the social effects of science and technology have not been uniform. As Raymond Aron has pointed out, the scientific-technological transformation has led universally to both greater uniformity and greater diversity. 59 In the social and cultural realms, institutions and attitudes continue to have a history of their own, which defies the reduction of modern civilization to a common denominator. T h e study of a modern world thus requires an approach that uses categories indebted to the idea of progress to conceptualize the developments which point to uniformities in modernization yet which at the same time takes into consideration the conditions and traditions that give this development everywhere its unique character. But neither is the vision of the future contained in the classical idea of progress entirely lost. In its Enlightenment form but also in its nineteenth-century expressions—Marx, Mill, and even Comte—the idea did not resolve into a naive assumption that scientific and technological advances automatically translated into social improvement. Progress was an affirmation of the belief that men and women were active participants in historical change and that enlightenment should serve as an instrument in the transformation of society along humane lines. There was divergence in the conception of what constituted such a society but also a broad consensus on the values of a world community in which ignorance, disease, want, and, not least important, war would be progressively eliminated, and human beings freed from the yokes of tradition and external control would determine their own lives. T h e shortcomings of the idea of progress are apparent: the failure to appreciate the resistance to rationality, the very ambiguities of reason, and the powerful needs for domination, which turn science and technology into powerful instruments of control and destruction. Growth 59. Aron, Progress and Disillusion.

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for the sake of growth has proven to be not only a dubious value from the view of human needs but a threat to human existence; but then growth for its own sake was never what the idea of progress in its classical form was about. Progress was always conceived in broad social terms. A basic assumption of the theorists of progress has been that "man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being;"60 that he cannot be submerged fully into the order of nature; that civilization is the setting in which he expresses and develops his humanity. The critics of progress have rightfully pointed out the limits of the idea. They have not invalidated the core of the idea, the moral imperative to create a world in which the conditions for a dignified human existence, which today do not exist for billions of human beings, are achieved. 60. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts," in Marx-Engels p. 116.

Reader,

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Communism is carrying out the historic mission of redeeming all people from social inequality, from all forms of domination and exploitation, and from the horrors of war, and it is establishing on earth peace, labor, liberty, equality, fraternity, and happiness for all nations. From Program of the CPSU, 1961

MARX AND ENGELS ON PROGRESS T h e ideology of progress might well be called the religion of Western civilization. It has functioned as a faith or a set of deep convictions, by which, during the last two centuries, the most trenchant changes have been justified. Scientific, technological, and economic advances have demonstrated its reality and have been used to justify disruptions and destructions of peoples, cultures, and the natural environment. But although progress is, in many senses, a reality, as an ideology it rests on assumptions, convictions, and beliefs that are fundamentally religious. In fact, as an ideology it can be traced back to the Western Christian conception of history as the stages of human salvation. Ultimately, one cannot understand the Marxian dialectic of progress without appreciating the dialectical interplay of sin and grace and of death and resurrection in Christian theology. T o be sure, Marxism is decidedly this-worldly. Long before Marx, the faith in salvation had become secularized, and eighteenth-century theories of progress incorporated 67

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notions about the end of religion and its replacement by science and skeptical philosophy. Nonetheless, the ideas of progress current in the age of Enlightenment cannot be fully appreciated without recognizing many of them as secularizations of notions that go back to Saint Augustine's City of God, Joachim de Floris' dream about the reign of the Holy Spirit, or the medieval mystics' yearning for the unity of all creation with God (see Keohane, pp. 27ff.). From the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Engels and Marx inherited the well-known commonplace about progress—the conception of history as the development of human powers through science, technology, and rational social organization, which would, once all people became enlightened, culminate in the reign of reason on earth, implying the solution of all hitherto unsolved human problems. By mastering the forces of nature, humanity would secure material comforts; and by mastering passions, superstitions, ignorance, and injustice, humanity would restructure institutions to shape a social world in which freedom, order, and equity would reinforce one another. In the writings of Marx and Engels, these aims are described as the appropriation of nature, the victory over necessity, the leap into the realm of freedom, the realization of all human potential, and the beginning of truly human history. The term they used for this transformation was communism. In asserting that Engels and Marx were heirs of many ideas associated with the Enlightenment, especially the unshakable faith in progress, one must point out that at every step in their intellectual development the two men voiced sharp criticism of virtually every representative eighteenth-century thinker, including Newton, Locke, Smith, and Kant. At the risk of oversimplification, I shall summarize their objections to these philosophical founding fathers of liberalism by stating that they dismissed the Enlightenment conception of progress as naive, the entire tradition of thought of which it was a part as shallow, unhistorical, and shamelessly apologetic. And yet the fact remains that the founders of Marxism were thoroughly committed to the basic idea of progress sketched above, and they expressed this commitment in countless ways. Rejection and acceptance simultaneously—what Freudians call ambivalence—is the attitude that Marxism expresses toward virtually all historic phenomena. With regard to the representative philosophers of the eighteenth century, the ambivalence of Marx and Engels was particularly deep. Contemporary students of Marxism allude to this attitude by arguing that Marxism represents an inversion (Umstulpung) of Ricardo's political economy or of liberal ideology in general, including eighteenth-century theories of progress, an inversion of any theory being a system of ideas which accepts that theory or some of its basic premises, turns it inside-out and thereby rejects it, and in this fashion enriches it. Indeed, Marxism sees itself as having precisely that kind of relationship to liberal conceptions of progress.

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Guided by this model, we will readily perceive that Marxist theories incorporate and invert such ideas as the Lockean theory of property (Marx's assertion that socialism aims for the "restoration of property" can be understood only in its light); the Smith-Ricardo model of the market; Voltaire's hatred of bureaucratic arbitrariness; the materialistic and atheistic views of Holbach and Helvétius; and the skepticism of Hume. Yet in the writings of Engels and Marx, these ideas reappear in a totally different framework of ideas; and much of this framework is taken from the romantic critics of the Enlightenment tradition, chiefly perhaps from Rousseau. The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a passionate indictment of the entire notion of progress, arguing, in effect, that "civilization corrupts." Nowhere does Rousseau spell out this indictment more clearly than in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind. How remarkable, therefore, that Engels should single out this work as one of the themes on which the entire Marxist opus is but a set of variations. In his famous popularization of Marxist doctrines, he describes the Discourse as a dialectical masterpiece, in which, decades before Hegel's birth, Hegelian philosophy is brilliantly anticipated: Thus we have already in Rousseau not only a development of ideas which to a hair resembles that followed in Marx's Capital, but also, in detail, an entire series of the very same dialectical turns of language used by Marx: processes which by their nature are antagonistic and contain within themselves a contradiction; the transformation of one extreme into its opposite; finally, as the kernel of the whole thing, the negation of the negation.1 What makes such praise by Engels so remarkable is the fact that generally he and Marx were highly critical of Rousseau for several reasons. For one thing, they often argued that the political system suggested in the Social Contract, which they regarded as the paradigmatic model of the liberal state, was based on false premises and therefore was naive and Utopian. More important for the purposes of this discussion, Marx and Engels were utterly contemptuous of the ideals Rousseau confessed throughout his life's work and of the romantic ideology which his work helped inspire. One should, perhaps, read the account that Engels wrote about the revolutionary partisan war of 1849, in which he participated, to get the flavor of his disdain for the Rousseauian ideal of the idyllic small community of honest, virtuous, frugal, simple folk not corrupted by greed for power, status, possessions, refined pleasures, or knowledge, nor disturbed by the mighty winds of world history. Some of these remarks, as well as the 1. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Diihring, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, 3 9 vols. (Berlin: Dietz-Verlag, 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 7 1 ) , X X , 130-31 (hereafter cited as M E W ) ; all English translations in this essay are mine.

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numerous scathing observations he and Marx made about the petty bourgeoisie and about democratic ideals, seem similarly to be directed at Rousseau. But this contempt need not conceal the debt they owed him, a debt which both of them acknowledged. Marx praised him for correctly seeing "political m a n " as an abstraction and an alienation, and he quoted with approval his description of the capitalist-worker relationship: "I shall permit—says the capitalist—that you will have the honor of serving me on condition that, for my pains in giving you orders, you will give me what little surpluses you have." 2 Engels, as we have seen, praised Rousseau for his dialectics, particularly for recognizing, first, that the development of inequality was progressive, and, second, that progress was antagonistic, every step toward progress also being retrogressive. "Every new progress of civilization is simultaneously a new progress in inequality. All institutions which the society that has developed with civilization gives itself turn into the opposite of their original purpose," writes Engels, and then illustrates this by a quotation from Rousseau about libertydestroying institutions of government (princes) which the people have given themselves for the purpose of protecting their liberty. 3 T h e two men's intellectual debt to Rousseau and the entire romantic tradition is stated most clearly, perhaps, by arguing that from this tradition they learned to focus their attention on the human cost of progress. T h e one concept which sums up this cost is, of course, that of alienation; and this Hegelian concept as well as its Marxian elaborations are unthinkable without the inspiration given by Rousseau. T o be sure, the preoccupation with the prevalence of evil in a world conceived of as rational, the entire dialectic of good purpose and bad results, of freedom and determination, progressive base and reactionary superstructure—this entire conception in which progress and retrogression intermingle in cunning (listig) fashion also goes back to medieval and Reformation Christian ideas, to say nothing of their ultimate source in Aristotle's writings. Still, any reader of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind will be struck by the number of ideas and phrases that will sound familiar to students of Marxism because they recur, often literally, in the writings of the two founders. W h e t h e r he discusses the despoliation of nature, the inauthenticity of civilized humans, the destruction of the natural community, the enslavement of women, or the decline of art, Rousseau offers ideas that we encounter again in The Holy Family, The German Ideology, Capital, and in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. H e sounds especially Marxian when he 2. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, in MEW, X X I I I , 774, note 232. The quotation is from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discours sur l'économie politique (Geneva, 1760), p. 70. See also Theorien iiber den Mebrwert, in MEW, X X V I , part 3, 57. T h e remark concerning Rousseau's view of "political m a n " is from Zur Judenfrage, MEW, I, 370.

3. Engels, Anti-Diihring,

in MEW,

X X , 130, 19.

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sums up the consequences of the division of labor: "equality vanished, property was introduced, labor became necessary, and boundless forests became smiling fields, which had to be watered by human sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon to sprout out of, and grow with, the harvests." 4 In fact, Marxism is not only an inversion of liberalism but is at the same time an inversion of romanticism, accepting not only Rousseau's theory of alienation, but also much of the critique of capitalism offered by romantic conservatives and reactionaries. Indeed Marxism derives its radical-critical impulse from precisely this school. It thus combines both the eighteenth-century faith in progress and nineteenth-century critiques of progress in a grand synthesis, in which history is neither the straight line or ladder from darkness to light that it was for Condorcet nor the equally unilinear path from innocence to corruption that it was for Rousseau; instead, it is a spiral in which retrogression and alienation are themselves necessary steps toward prog ess. Ultimately, Marx and Engels were on the side of Condorcet rather than Rousseau. While the latter accepts the alienation of the human being as inevitable and, indeed, in some sense as desirable, seeking to mitigate its consequences in the simple life, they opted for progress, arguing that it would be the result of alienation. Thus, their theory turned out to be a humanistic variant of Leibnitz's theodicy, that is, an anthropodicy. They would have agreed with Usbek, of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, who was convinced that technology, including strange new chemicals and superweapons of mass destruction, would always be controlled and serve human needs; 5 or with Goethe, whose Faust begins with the assertion that "in the beginning was the deed" and ends with the assertion that knowledge pursued for the purpose of serving material human needs is knowledge of which even heaven approves, regardless of the sacrifices made en route. The famous remarks Marx made about Greek art, which he greatly and naively 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Second Discourse," in The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, ed. Lester G. Crocker ( N e w York: Pocket Book), p. 220. 5. Cf. a contemporary expression of the same faith: It's sometimes argued that there's no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times. But this argument, though romantically appealing, doesn't hold up. The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the school-book pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life—the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself. (Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ( N e w York: Morrow, 1974).)

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admired, but nonetheless put in its place as the product of the infantile stage of human progress, express the same faith in progress which Engels offered upon his return home from his first two years in Manchester: he raved to Marx about how much the city had developed in such a short time: whole forests have been cut down, he wrote triumphantly. In countless ways, Engels and Marx expressed their conviction that progress was promoted precisely by the destructive and oppressive trends the romantics denounced. Slavery, the oppression of women, the exploitation of wage labor, the ruination of the peasantry, the despoliation of nature, the mechanization of life, the destruction of religious and cultural traditions, the colonization of formerly independent nations, from Bohemia to India, from China to Mexico— these and other stages in the march of civilization Marx and Engels described in all their horrors and then made sure to add that every one of them was necessary and desirable for assuring the eventual victory of progress. It is as though they were in agreement with Nietzsche's statement that "the magnitude of any 'progress' indeed is measured by the mass of everything that had to be sacrificed for its sake."6 The romantic laments over these costs they always dismissed as sentimental, reactionary, and infantile. They would have scoffed at the contemporary anthropologist Marshall Sahlins for asserting that Western civilization is dangerous "because in the interest of this growth it does not hesitate to destroy any other form of humanity whose difference from us consists in having discovered not merely other codes of existence but ways of achieving an end that still eludes us: the mastery by society of society's mastery over nature." 7 It is noteworthy, in this connection, that Engels and Marx reacted angrily and with incomprehension to suggestions that their own critique of capitalism and its ills might have been inspired or anticipated by romantic reactionaries of previous generations. The philosophic underpinnings of this faith remain a matter of controversy, and so, to some extent, is the degree of doubt Marx and Engels generated to qualify their faith. Both of them at various times had moments of despair during which they thought history was taking wrong turns toward barbarism rather than toward the communist Utopia. Both of them allowed the possibility of such an alternative, though both often reassured each other that, in the final analysis, humanity would fulfill its destiny of creating a world fit for human beings to live in. Moreover, they seem to have made a clear distinction 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Munich: Goldman n-Verlag, 1877), pp. 65-66. In German, the statement reads as follows: "Die Grosse eines Fortschritts' bemisst sich sogar nach der Masse dessen, was ihm alles geopfert werden musste." 7. Marshall D. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

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between progressive civilizations and those condemned to stagnate unless they were coerced into participation in historic developments by brute force from outside, that is, by colonialism and imperialism. Max Weber's comparison of Chinese and Western civilizations is but a variation on a theme struck more than once by Engels and Marx. At times they dwelled on the human costs of progress so much and waxed so nostalgic about the cozy relationships of feudalism or the idyllic image of primitive society that they sounded like echoes of romanticism. But these were only momentary lapses. By and large, their faith in progress remained unshaken. This faith is founded either on a neo-Hegelian view of the entire universe as teleological, striving for self-perfection or self-realization, or on a faith in human potential so absolute that the human species is elevated to the role of the creator of the world. Contemporary students of Marxism today tend to attribute the former view to Engels, who, to be sure, spent much effort on an unfinished work on the philosophy of science, which seems to see the entire cosmos as dynamic and, perhaps, imbued with purpose. But Marx probably shared this view. Why else would he have greeted Darwin's discoveries with such enthusiasm that he wanted to dedicate the first volume of Das Kapital to him? Marx's enthusiasm was based on the belief that the Darwinist theory of evolution had proven that all of nature participates in the dialectic of progress. There are other statements Marx made which suggest that he at least toyed with such notions of a teleological cosmology in which some creative urge is attributed to all existence. In the final analysis, however, he and Engels were far more interested in human relations and human action; and the ultimate premise for their faith in progress remains their unshakable faith in the unlimited creative potential of the human species. Even in the drafts Engels left for essays on the philosophy of science, what is stressed is not the dynamic nature of "matter" but the progress in knowledge our civilization has made since the Renaissance. The conviction he and Marx shared about the imminent dawn of communism, of course, was based on their belief that they had done for human history what Copernicus and Newton had done for the solar system: they thought they had laid bare its laws of development; and that of which we have scientific knowledge we can begin to control. Subsequent Marxist schools have stressed one or the other philosophic premise, but all of them have taken for granted the eventual inevitability of progress. The theoretical authorities of the Second International—Kautsky, Mehring, and Plekhanov were the outstanding representatives—subscribed to a deterministic philosophy suggesting a teleological cosmos. Their ideology expressed the smug conviction that communism was the inevitable end product of Western history, and those like themselves who were on its side would soon be

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in power. This ideology, strangely enough, turned out to be quite compatible with a politics of accommodation to, or gradual reform of, existing regimes. T H I R D W O R L D M A R X I S M AS A T H E O R Y OF PROGRESS

Third World Marxism, 8 from Russian Bolshevism to its Asian, African, and Latin-American variants, sees itself as a civilizing agent promoting progress. Its image of the contemporary world is shaped by the conception of modern imperialism as a regressive, reactionary, and retarding force that promotes and reproduces underdevelopment throughout the Third World; capitalist monopolies similarly retard development, and racism keeps ethnic minorities and nonwhite nations in a dependent and servile position, poorly educated, ill equipped for modern life. In Third World Marxism, the Marxist theory of inevitable progress has thus transformed itself into a set of programs for modernization, all of them planning economic and technological growth, scientific development, massive resocialization of the population for life in the twentieth century, with the concomitant antagonism to many aspects of traditional culture and incumbent ruling classes, with national liberation from previous dependencies, as well as the mobilization of the masses for participation in this process. Antagonism to incumbent elites and the belief in national independence as an essential precondition for this modernization make Third World Marxism revolutionary; before anything else, it seeks, therefore, to mobilize the masses for revolution. Third World Marxism thus is a conscious attempt to realize the Marxist goal in precisely those areas of the world which, according to Marx, had not participated in the forward march of Western civilization and thus had not partaken of progress. Hence, although the theorists of the Second International, speaking for growing numbers of workers in highly industrialized societies, could believe that progress was inevitable even if they themselves did little or nothing to promote it, Third World Marxists seek to push, shove, or drag their countries into the progressive tendencies of history by heroic effort. Progress is to be imposed on underdeveloped nations by an elite of professional revolutionaries, who proclaim themselves the enlightened vanguard of the exploited, in the name of which they establish their dictatorship. The primary tasks of this dictatorship are building the economic base for socialism, functioning as substitute capitalist in accumulating the material resources required for a modern economy, training the people to function in it, and inducing work discipline and a "communist" attitude toward work. 9 8. By "Third World Marxism," I mean those ideologies and movements in underdeveloped countries which "officially" subscribe to the political ideas of Engels, Marx, and Lenin. 9. See V.G. Afans'ev, Nauchnyi kommunizm (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi

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The leaders of Third World Marxist movements thus see themselves as the pioneers of that universal civilization developed in the West, which, in the name of progress, is to be imposed on all non-Western cultures. Such a program implies either the destruction or the deep transformation of autochthonous cultures; and indeed the Third World Marxist doctrines tend to regard most elements of the old cultures— religion, social structure, mores, and cosmology—as inherently reactionary and thus harmful. At the same time, many Marxist-Leninist theorists have recognized the problem discussed by Crawford Young (see pp. 92ff.), that is, the need to reconcile the universal ideal of amelioration with the deeply ingrained views and attitudes springing out of native cultures. One can see this most clearly, perhaps, in observing how leaders like Mao, Ho, Castro, and Cabral seek to translate the universal currency of Marxist-Leninist terminology into local verbal coinage, linguistic adaptations which at times subtly change not only the vocabulary but also the message and the policies. It is already more difficult to interpret organizational forms and mobilization patterns of various Third World Marxist movements as conscious or unconscious accommodations with native cultures. Altogether, the interplay of universalism and nativism in Third World Marxist movements may be one of the most interesting subjects for study.10 Again, for Third World Marxists, the imposition of the universal pattern of amelioration is the primary goal, accommodations to local cultures seen, at their best, as tactical compromises. The Stalinist formula, according to which the Soviet system should be "socialist in content, and national in form," makes this clear; the careful cultivation of selected folk arts, crafts, and customs in the Soviet Union can be compared with the popularity of cowboy rodeos and Bluegrass music in the United States: progress, while destroying the cultures which these activities expressed, has preserved them as pretty or amusing relics and placed them in its museums. The philosophy of Third World Marxism is an inversion of the ideas of Engels and Marx: consciousness rather than the internal pressure of rapidly growing productive forces is to be the driving force of progress. The superstructure, not the base, is the dynamic element, as the state, established in a backward nation, painfully accumulates the essential means of production for an advanced economy. "The most important distinguishing feature of socialism, as against capitalism," argues a Soviet theoretician, "is that it does not arise spontaneously but is erected consciously by all those who do productive labor under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist party and on the basis of the theory of scientific communism." 1 1 The revolution, supposedly, is literatury, 1966), p. 196. 10. F o r a discussion of the general problem, see Alfred G. Meyer, "Communist Revolutions and Cultural Change," Studies in Comparative Communism 5(4) (Winter 1972): 3 4 5 - 7 0 .

11. Afanas'ev, Nauchnyi kommunizm,

p. 194.

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promoted not because of highly developed, and decaying, capitalism, but because of its absence. History here is seen not as a teleological process on which humanity might rely but as an obstacle it must overcome. Heroic initiative, swimming against the current, firm leadership against discouraging obstacles—those are the images with which Lenin exhorted his followers to revolutionary action. PROGRESS AS VIEWED IN SOVIET IDEOLOGY

The immediate goal of the systems which Third World Marxism manages to found is to catch up with the West, economically, militarily, technologically, and scientifically. Western achievements in production and defense are to be replicated, but the free-enterprise society, which in the West promoted these attainments, is to be avoided. T o be sure, the ultimate goal envisaged is precisely the combination of democratic self-government and up-to-date technology—at least that is what Lenin's famous definition of communism as "Soviet rule plus electrification of the country" implies. But concerning the relative weight to be given to these two elements, there is sharp disagreement within Third World Marxism; and in practice the temptation to forget about the democratic and egalitarian aims, at least for the time being, has proven overwhelmingly strong so that progress is to be measured much more by the growth of technology and the accumulation of the means of production and destruction than by the rearing of autonomous individuals realizing their full human potentials. An East European reform communist writing under a pseudonym has argued that the resulting socialist systems in Russia and Eastern Europe combine a "socialist" class structure with an essentially capitalist economy and a "feudal" state so that it is progressive and reactionary at one and the same time. 12 For justification of this failure so far to have reached the communist goal, Soviet theoreticians once more revert to the deterministic interpretation of Marxism that argues that the communist superstructure can develop only after the economic base has been completed. An attempt to have genuine communist relations before the economic preconditions are present is condemned as Utopian and infantile. But the same Soviet writer who argues this point, V.G. Afanas'ev, also resorts to the answer given by Malthusians and other nineteenthcentury liberals trying to defend the inequalities of capitalism: if equality were granted, if people were to receive goods in accordance with their needs, there would not be enough for all, and too much consumption would slow down the process of capital accumulation. 15 What Afanas'ev omits to point out is that, obviously, vital human needs will meanwhile remain unfilled. Progress, in Third World Marxism, is thus identified with the 12. Felipe Garcia Casals, The Syncretic Society (White Plains, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1980). 13- Afanas'ev, Nauchnyi kommunizm, pp. 206-07.

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accumulation of technology. This expresses itself, in its most naive form, in the conviction that the messier the traffic jam in the capital city, the more advanced is the country. President Eisenhower, when taking Nikita Krushchev to Camp David, was waxing lyrical about the peace and quiet and the lack of bother they would find in that idyllic mountain retreat. "Do you have a place, Mr. Chairman, where you can get away from jangling telephones and other such disturbances?" he asked his guest; and Nikita Sergeevich is reported to have replied, somewhat testily, "Mr. President, we haven't got as many telephones yet as you, but we will." Within Marxist ideas about progress there has, in short, developed a tension analogous to that between the democratic and the utilitarian traditions in liberalism, the former, perhaps, to be associated with the revolutionary phases of liberalism, the latter with liberalism as an establishment ideology. What can be said about the Victorian or Third Republic idea of "progress" could be said about contemporary Soviet conceptions of progress. Comparable to Saint-Simonians, Comteans, Utilitarians and their twentieth-century successors, communist elites proclaim their intention to travel the road toward progress on the basis of expertise and rational planning within the given system. (In fact, it should be noted, the pattern of development in both systems has been convulsive, with recurrent "great leaps" followed by periods of institutionalization.) Like the establishment liberals of the last one hundred and fifty years, the ideologists of ruling communist parties combine elitist convictions with democratic rhetoric, voice undiminished confidence in the achievements they have made and expect still to make and are reticent or altogether silent about the human costs of progress. In both the establishment-liberal and ruling-communist pronouncements, the ideology of progress supports the increasing bureaucratization of social life. Bureaucratization as an essential element of the vision of progress is linked to the notion of the reign of reason, which is central to both liberal and Marxist ideas of progress. In revolutionary liberalism and communism, the reign of reason implied liberty and equality. In both of these schools, once they have begun to justify existing systems, rationality turns into something to be imposed by effective organization and scientific management so that the goal begins to resemble the Weberian model of bureaucracy, based on an organized hierarchy of experts—though usually without the note of regret over the accompanying disenchantment of human life. Both in liberalism and communism the religion of progress becomes morally and aesthetically insensitive and, from the point of view of whoever aims toward the moral improvement of human intercourse, morally objectionable. If this is too strong a statement, at least one can point out that in both schools, once their adherents have come to power, progress is redefined by toning down expectations. S.G. Strumilin, a noted Soviet economist who has written a great

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deal about the forthcoming transition to full communism, warned that expectations should not be pinned too high. The transition to communism, he argued, will be a very lengthy process, and one should be realistic, not Utopian, in defining it.14 Meanwhile, Afanas'ev suggests that communism will be achieved by the means of intensifying the societal features of present-day Soviet Russia. 15 Socialist democracy, argues Strumilin, demands a great deal more centralization and coordination than capitalism, hence also continued control by the party as the central planning and commanding agency.16 Indeed, not only during the transition to communism is it necessary to strengthen both state and party, writes yet another Soviet theorist; even after communism is reached, the state cannot disappear until the entire world has gone communist. 17 In his critique of the Gotha program of the German socialist party, Marx gave a tantalizingly brief sketch of communism. It would be a system in which people no longer would be enthralled by the division of labor; specifically, the distinction between mental and physical work would disappear. Work would cease to be a means for survival and would, instead, become a vital need for every healthy person. All individuals would be able to develop their many varied gifts and talents, leading to a flowering of creativity. Finally, while each would contribute according to his or her ability, each would receive according to need: abundance would reign. To this description of communism the 1961 program of the Soviet Communist party makes one important addition: communism will be a highly organized society in which the party maintains its policy-making functions. 18 Afanas'ev adds that it will be a system in which scientific management reigns not only over the economy but over all social activities so that it will be a society analogous to an efficient machine, in which all spontaneity is eliminated. 19 One of the implications is the need to mobilize the social sciences and humanities for the double task of managing this society and of educating the citizenry for smooth functioning within it. In discussing these implications, leading Soviet academics have stressed the need for the nationwide coordination of all social science research, the need for more rigorous research methodologies, especially the use of statistics and computer techniques, and the need to bring the social and natural sciences closer together. Finally, they emphasize the growing 14. S.G. Strumilin, Problemy sotsializma i kommunizma

v SSSR (Moscow: Iz-

datel'stvo ekonomicheskoi literatury, 1961), pp. 307-08.

15. Afanas'ev, Nauchnyi kommunizm, p. 205. 16. Strumilin, Problemy sotsializma, p. 15. 17. A.S. Podgalo, Period razvernutogo stroitel'stva kommunizma datel'stvo Znanie, 1959), pp. 42-48. See also Afanas'ev, Nauchnyi 32 Iff.

18. Programma KPSS, in Materialy XXII s'ezda KPSS, p. 366. 19. Afanas'ev, Nauchnyi kommunizm, pp. 210ff.

(Moscow: Iz-

kommunizm,

pp.

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role of the party in deciding scientific issues.20 And while the social sciences are to be thus mobilized, it is taken for granted, in the manner of the American end-of-ideology school, that no further drastic changes are needed to assure progress. We have reached the threshold of the desirable society, Soviet ideologists argue; all we need now is further peaceful development. For the transition from socialism to communism, no revolution or other drastic change is needed. Between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the communist people's state there is no great difference. 21 In answer to those who might inquire about the promised withering away of the state, we are told that, instead, the stress will be on discipline of people who know their place and function in society, will freely contribute their labor for the common good, and will observe the rules of communal life; it will be on organization, on a strong order and strict coordination of efforts; and it will be on leadership which, in communism, will be like the gentle dictatorship of the orchestra conductor. 22 As in contemporary liberal rhetoric, these communist ideas about the road to progress are embedded in a great deal of self-congratulation about what has been achieved so far. It would be a mistake to underestimate the meaningfulness of the achievements which Soviet and East European systems have in fact made toward their goal and the potential results that might be expected from them for the flourishing of those qualities in human intercourse and for the comprehensive development of creative potentials in individuals—"give or take some major historical setbacks and a few wars, revolutions, and gruesome barbarities." The development and spread of knowledge, science, and technology have increased material welfare, and these together have increased political participation and produced modern social, economic, and political organization.... Similarly, the development of modern organizations has contributed to the growth and spread of knowledge, the growth of technology, and the increase in welfare. A case could be made for intellectual and moral improvements as well, and for some significant net increase in the sum and distribution of human satisfaction as well (see p. 6). C O N T E M P O R A R Y W E S T E R N MARXISM

Such a statement, applied to the U.S.S.R. or the German Democratic Republic, is likely to stick in the throat of anyone preoccupied with the 20. Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Stroitel'stvo kommunizma i obshchestvennye nauki: Materialy sessii Obshchego sobraniia Akademii Nauk SSSR 19-20 oktiabria 1962 g. (Moscow: Izdanie Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1962); see esp. the contributions by M. V. Keldysh, L.F. Il'ichev, A.I. Berg, Iu.P. Frantsev, P . N . Fedoseev, V.P. Eliutin, B.P. Konstantinov, A.A. Markov, M . N . Alekseev, A.G. Spirkin, and V . D . Novikov. See also Afanas'ev, Nauchnyi kommunizm, p. 214. 21. Afanas'ev, Nauchnyi kommunizm, pp. 195, 204. 22. Ibid., p. 324.

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heavy price these and other countries have paid and still are paying for their achievements. Western Marxists, in particular, have had difficulty accepting as progress what they might prefer to describe as the "withering away of Utopia." This is but one of the many reasons why Western Marxism has tended to stress the romantic elements in Marxism; hence its preoccupation with dialectical contradictions, with the moral and aesthetic perils of radical politics, and with the concept of alienation—a term which for some decades was totally absent from the vocabulary of ruling communist parties. One can trace variations of such attitudes in Jugoslav communism, in Euro-communism, and in the cluster of Marxist intellectuals loosely known as the Frankfurt school. Nonetheless, ultimately they remain Marxists only as long as they refuse to abandon their confidence in the possibility of progress. Contemporary Western Marxism regards itself as an ideology and a movement which seeks to carry out the task which Frederic Jameson identified as that of dialectical criticism: "to pass judgment on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future." 23 Keeping this idea alive is a confession of faith in progress. This is defiant, not to say desperate, optimism. From the point of view of Western Marxism, the history of the world since the death of Engels has been a series of disasters likely to shake even the most firmly grounded faith in progress: the general failure of revolutionary socialism in those countries where Marx and Engels thought it would succeed; the victories of Third World Marxism, which to Western critics represents a barbarization of the doctrine; two world wars; the rise of fascism and Stalinism; Gulag and extermination camps; vicious colonial wars in Algeria, Indo-China, and elsewhere; ecological disasters and seeming moral crises. Looking at the world in the twentieth century, even a Marxist must find it difficult to maintain a belief in progress. And in the final analysis, even the most abstruse epistemological and aesthetic issues (to mention only some) with which Western Marxists deal can be understood only as responses to this lingering crisis of confidence. This same crisis, which in turn is related to so-called postmaterialism, appears to have begun also in the socialist systems of Eastern Europe. The Western press has given much publicity to the great variety of dissenters in all countries east of the Elbe river. W e know about national, religious, and cultural revival movements, some of them of considerable strength. Representatives of such currents have fled to the West or been expelled; some of those who are still in the communist world have published their works abroad. The social basis of this dissidence appears to range from peasants, religious believers, 23. Fredric Jameson, Marxism Press, 1971), p. 416.

and Form

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

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tribal people, and other groups that never adjusted to twentiethcentury civilization, on the one hand, to urban intellectuals, a jaded jeunesse dorée, and other beneficiaries of progress on the other, who raise questions quite similar to those asked in the West today (see Barnes, pp. 4l5ff.). How deep do such sentiments run in Eastern Europe, in China, or in the Soviet Union? We do not, alas, have reliable ways of ascertaining this. That they are present is clear. Nor are Western observers the only ones to notice them. Communist authorities, too, have paid attention to the emergence of doubts about the blessings of progress. Here is just one typical response. A Romanian weekly recently felt the need to comment on the fact that some people have lost their faith in the future of humanity. The weekly did this, first, by reference to the tremendous strides that have been made in Eastern Europe since the dismal years of World War II, an argument which in that part of the world will ring true to many readers. But, more important, it reaffirmed the Marxist assumption that humanity, having shown itself capable of solving seemingly insuperable problems in the past, is likely also to find solutions to the technological and social problems facing us at the present time. The energy and materials crisis will be solved. The population of the globe will stabilize because ways of increasing the output of foodstuffs are already known. "Do we have good reasons to be optimistic? We do indeed, yet only to the extent to which we understand this optimism not as a passive expectation of what is doomed to happen, but as a firm awareness of the need to work unceasingly, tirelessly and efficiently for making developments take the desired course... ,"24 Ever since the Christian doctrine of salvation turned into a political theory, and through its many secularizations in absolutist, mercantilist, liberal, utilitarian, socialist, and communist ideologies, the religion of progress has assumed two mutually antagonistic forms. It has been an essential element in ideologies of protest, suggesting and justifying change, reform, rebellion, and revolution; and it has served as the underpinning of establishment ideologies, justifying and rationalizing existing economic and political system. Thus, the religion of progress has given confidence to political heroes and martyrs, to charismatic leaders and ovine followers, to rational planners and reckless adventurers, inspiring great benefactors as well as those who committed the most unspeakable crimes against humanity and against the earth. Marxism is the latest denomination in this family of political religions. Its history, like the history of earlier churches in the religion of progress, illustrates this duality of the faith in progress. What all believers in progress share is the conviction that, ulti24. Felicia Antip, "May We Be Optimistic?" Tribuna României, 8(151) (February 15, 1979): 10.

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mately, human history makes sense and is imbued with a definable goal. Earthly salvation does beckon. This faith implies that, in the final analysis, all the crimes and stupidities committed and tolerated in the name of progress, all the damage inflicted on people and on our environment, will be outweighed by the benefits that will result from it all. Only future historians will be capable of judging whether this ideology itself was a blessing or a curse.

4 Ideas of Progress in the Third World CRAWFORD

YOUNG

We are citizens of no mean country and we are proud of the land of our birth, of our people, our culture and traditions. That pride should not be for a romanticized past to which we want to cling; nor should it encourage exclusiveness or a want of appreciation of ways other than ours.... We have a long way to go and much leeway to make up before we can take our proper station with others in the van of human civilization and progress. And we have to hurry, for the time at our disposal is limited and the pace of the world grows ever swifter.... Nehru, The Discovery

of India

T h e s e reflections by one of the most venerated and influential Third World statesmen, composed in prison shortly before his elevation to the premiership, serve as fitting prologue. T h e idea of progress, that once-sturdy child of the Enlightenment, may appear frail and infirm in the postindustrial W e s t . N o t so in the Third World; as Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson has argued: " T o be a leader or a technocrat in any Third World society is, whatever one's ideological position, at the very least, to be wholly committed to the idea of progress." 1 1. Orlando Patterson, " T h e Transformation of the Idea of Progress in the Third

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Nehru's thoughts reflect those of the communities which shared his time and space: the postcolonial states of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They embodied a profound faith in material science, which, blended with liberation, would yield transformation. This elixir of change retained the cultural heritage but distilled from the "romanticized past," which might impede "social betterment." Progress was both a possible dream and a categorical moral imperative; the First and Second worlds, after all, had achieved it. T h e shackles of poverty, whether viewed as millennial curse or imperialist imposition, simply had to be sundered. Yet, as Patterson further notes, a jarring vector of uncertainty enters and has shaken the serene confidence which suffused the Nehru testament: "once the attempt is made to actualize the idea of progress, the reality of the formidable obstacles involved immediately become apparent. For almost all Third World countries, these obstacles have proven to be insurmountable." 2 Those who discovered the idea of progress and others who elevated it to a commanding precept of the modern world, such as J . B. Bury and Warren Wagar, or those who mourn its decay, such as Judith Sklar and Raymond Aron, locate the concept exclusively in Western thought. 3 Further, their search for the idea lies in the philosophical realm; Bacon, Descartes, Rousseau, Condorcet, and Smith are numbered among its prophets. T o extend our quest to the Third World takes us at once into the political realm; Mao Tse-tung, Kwame Nkrumah, and Gamal Abdel Nasser are its spokesmen. It is less a problematic component of moral discourse than a premise which pervades, even saturates, political expression. T o them, the Bury mode of analysis, discovering the idea through the philosophers who fashioned it, is a misplaced exercise. Less striking than the existence of the idea is the well-nigh universal assent it commands. Explanation needs to focus upon the social processes which have shaped this intellectual consensus rather than merely cataloguing those who have pledged their fealty to the common creed. Before plunging into this task, we may pause to concede the apparent impudence of presuming to contain within a single discussion a universe so diverse and amorphous as a "Third World," a figure of speech which originates as a residual geographic category when the Western and communist sets of states are removed. It is indeed breathtaking to lump polities as disparate as Japan and Equatorial Guinea, Argentina and Nepal. Many have come to speak of a "Fourth World," World," American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Western Center) Conference on the Transformation of the Idea of Progress, San Diego, February 1977, p. 2. 2. Ibid, p. 3. 3. J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (1920; rpt. New York: Dover, 1955); W. Warren Wagar, Good Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972); Judith Sklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957); Raymond Aron, Les désillusions du progrès (Paris: Colmann-Lévy, 1969).

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composed of the most desperately poor group of countries, especially those concentrated in Africa. Yet despite the vast dissimilarities, for our present purposes a quite common pattern of transmission and reception of the idea of progress may be discerned, vehicled through imperial domination by the "First World" and the revolt against it. ORIGINS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS IN THE THIRD WORLD

First, what precisely is the idea of progress in the Third World? Bury, in giving birth to this debate, defines the concept as past, present, and future movement of civilization in a desirable direction. Charles van Doren proposes that we understand the idea as simply "irreversible ameliorative change." 4 Nannerl Keohane offers a useful basis for understanding present uncertainties about the idea in the West by decomposing the concept into four components: increased human knowledge about the world, increased human power over the world, increased human virtue deriving from this knowledge, and increased happiness as consequence of the other three (see pp. 27ff.). The essence of the Third World variant lies in such passe-partout metaphors as "development" and "modernity." Poverty, ignorance, and disease are the demons of antiprogress; "irreversible ameliorative change" is achieved through exorcising them. The remedies of knowledge and power are present in the world and need only be seized. Lucian Pye has aptly termed this universally espoused aspiration to "advancement and progress" as a world culture of modernity, "based on advanced technology and the spirit of science, on a rational view of life, a secular approach to social relations, a feeling for justice in public affairs, and, above all else, on the acceptance in the political realm of the belief that the prime unit of the polity should be the nation-state." 5 We may note, at this juncture, that progress thus conceived lies above all in the material realm. However universal its diffusion, the idea of progress is a recent arrival in the Third World. The concept of ameliorative change was as foreign to the great cosmologies of the non-Western world as it was to the medieval West. Progress is not immanent in the tenets of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism. Individuals or human communities may attain greater perfection by a willing submission to divine will or religious prescription, but the underlying materialism of the Western concept of progress is wholly foreign. Periods of moral decay alternated with moments of regeneration through a return to right conduct. The encounter between this Eastern world view and the Western idea of progress inevitably posed the question as to whether there was 4. Bury, Idea of Progress, p. 2; Charles van Doren, The Idea of Progress (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 3-16. 5. Lucian W. Pye, Aspects of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), p. 8.

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inherent contradiction between the two. Within each of the major cosmologies, reformers emerged to reconcile the impulse to modernity with religious doctrine. Muhammed Abduh of Egypt, Jamaluddin Afghani of Persia, the Muhammadiya movement in Indonesia for Islam, Swami Dayananda Saraswati and Swami Vivekenanda for Hinduism were among the many who endeavored to demonstrate that acceptance of technological change was not antithetical to the Eastern heritage. 6 But others perceived the Western idea of change as a threat because it was associated with domination (also with the threat of Christian proselytization) and because many of the emissaries of imperialism held non-Western cultures in singularly low esteem; Macauley spoke for an age in his famous dictum that a shelf of good English books was worth all of the wisdom in India. Reformers argued that there was no necessary antithesis between religious heritage and material progress; the real threat was cultural alienation, which could be averted only by mediating progress through heritage. T o postulate incompatibility, in their view, was to invite the annihilation of the latter by the former, and with it the extinction of the faith. These debates touched above all the religious literati of society. At the peasant base of society, the idea of progress was less philosophical anathema than simply beyond the ken of imagination. Observable reality secreted the concept of the "limited good," identified by George Foster and embellished by James Scott. 7 Village life was a zero-sum game, with absolutely finite resources fixed by the narrow limits of hand tools, household animals, family labor, and often by limited access to land. Within this cognitive frame, the expansion of wellbeing of some could only be achieved by reduction in returns to others. T h e boundaries of human possibility were not philosophical but empirical; cultural values, embodied in religion, located virtue in willing submission to this bounded existence but did not create the limits. Indeed, Melford Spiro and Manning Nash, in exploring the issue as to whether the Buddhist world view of Burmese peasants inhibited change, offer convincing testimony that the more exacting otherworldy prescriptions of the faith—extinction of desire—rested quite lightly on most villagers. T h e onerous requirements of transcendence of self through extinction of desire were attainable only by the monks; for ordinary mortals, if the boundaries of the limited good could be slightly expanded by mundane effort, faith offered no barrier. 8 Not 6. Among the numerous works on this theme, see Marshall G. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), vol. 3; Donald S. Smith, Religion and Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); and Melford E. Spiro, Buddhism and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 7. George Foster, "Peasant Society: The Image of the Limited Good," American Anthropologist, 62 (April 1965): 293-315; James C. Scott, Political Ideology in Malaysia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968). 8. Spiro, Buddhism and Society; Manning Nash, The Golden Road to Modernity (New York: Wiley, 1965).

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only the concept of ameliorative change but the sense of the cultural threat of Westernization as ransom of progress were remote to most, though the symbolic resources and political mobilization potential of Islam did, in certain times and places, activate the rural masses against Western intrusion. 9 The idea of progress, after its birth in the West, was carried to the Third World in the baggage trains of imperial conquest beginning in the fifteenth century. Here we may usefully distinguish three patterns of internalization of the premise of change: (1) the Latin American model (including the Caribbean), based upon radical submergence of indigenous cultures; (2) later colonialism in Africa and Asia, where the superstructure of Western rule effected great changes at the level of material technology and values but eventually retreated before anticolonial nationalism; and (3) a handful of polities in Africa and Asia, such as Japan, China, Thailand, Afghanistan, Iran, and Ethiopia, which staved off conquest by defensive modernization. Each of these merits brief exploration. European expansion in the Western hemisphere occurred before the emergence of the idea of progress in the West. The major centers of Indian civilization, in Mexico and the Andes, were decapitated by tiny bands of treasure-seeking conquistadors, accompanied by priests whose quest for a harvest of souls was informed by the spirit of the Crusades, and the bitter Iberian struggle to extirpate the influence of Moor and Jew. The result was a demographic and cultural holocaust for indigenous populations. Spanish and Portuguese language and culture were swiftly established at the summit, less by conscious design than by the unexamined assumption that royal and spiritual domain should be extended by the natural law of conquest. The structure of earlier religions was shattered by the razing of the temples and decimation of the priesthood; from their rubble the cathedrals of the new faith militant were erected. The sedentary and fixed populations within reach of centralized state structures were incorporated within the new apparatus of hegemony; the decentralized societies of both Americas had the option of retreat beyond immediate reach of the colonizers. Epidemics and exploitation took a tremendous toll, entirely depopulating the Caribbean islands, while in Mexico and Guatemala Indian populations fell to one-seventh of the preconquest levels during the first century of Spanish rule.10 From the early days, a crucial category of racially mixed persons emerged, and these generally identified with Iberian culture. A social continuum thus developed, whose apex was Iberian and Catholic. Mobility was possible, not only through genetic 9. For example, in the various Mahdi movements, or religious reform orders such as Wahabiya, Senusiya, Qadariya, among others. 10. See Eric Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 196-99.

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mestization but also by cultural migration through the adoption of European language, dress, lifestyle, and the Catholic religion. In the plantation economies of the Caribbean and lowland South America (and the American south), economies based on servile labor led to massive importation of African slaves (and, in the nineteenth century, indentured Asians in a few places). Even where the African component was predominant, the cultural dislocation of uprooting and prolonged European hegemony yielded contemporary polities in which immigrant culture was predominant. This was most completely evident in the Hispanic isles (Cuba and the Dominican Republic) but also holds for the English-speaking Caribbean; only Haiti, with its early slave revolution, is a partial exception. 1 1 The nation-state system in Latin America arose from the revolt of the socially hegemonic Creole elites against the mercantile-absolutist colonial state at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The new states viewed themselves as culturally European, even though s o m e — such as the Andes republics and Paraguay—were genetically predominantly Indian. There was thus no sense of moral ambivalence in the reception of the idea of progress; the social elites of Latin America were eager to assimilate European currents of thought. The primary nineteenth-century vehicle for progress was the concept of the liberal state, as modified in dialectic with the corpus of Catholic social thought with its corporatist implications. The liberal state, in truth, proved an imperfect instrument of ameliorative change in much of Latin America, as the image of progress was juxtaposed to the reality of social fragmentation, rural paternalism, and coercive authoritarianism. Yet the idea of the liberal state remained the primary incubator of progress until well into the twentieth century. 12 In much of Asia and Africa, colonialism resulted in the domination but not the submergence of the indigenous culture and society. Its duration was much briefer than it was in Latin America—really less than a century in most areas, with scattered exceptions such as Algeria, South Africa, the Philippines, parts of India, and Indonesia. Here the structures of domination imposed a new state apparatus, ultimately to become the framework for the postcolonial nation-state, which so transformed cultural geography. T h e new set of power relationships 11. In the Haitian case, European hegemony was quite short-lived, as the French sugar economy of the "pearl of the Antilles" took off only in the eighteenth century, then was swept away by Toussaint L'Ouverture and Henri Christophe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The predominance of Creole rather than French as the spoken language is evidence of the incomplete assimilation. See Robert I. Rotberg, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). 12. See, especially on these issues, Morris J. Blackman and Ronald G. Hellman, eds., Terms of Conflict: Ideology in Latin American Politics (Philadelphia, Pa.: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1977); Rex Crawford, A Century of Latin American Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); James Malloy, ed., Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).

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radically altered extant systems of status, which became increasingly contingent on proximity to the colonial structures. The political economy of colonialism closed down earlier pathways to wealth, and the mercantilist order of European rule forced those seeking accumulation into linkage with the extractive mechanisms of the colonial state or, as in many parts of colonial Africa, entirely monopolized wealth within the expatriate community. Social mobility was channeled into the status pathways designated by the colonizer and came to be tightly linked to Western education. An increasingly large and visible portion of roles conferring status and relative prosperity required formal educational qualifications, available through completion of schooling whose higher levels, in the colonial period and beyond, were primarily staffed by Europeans. 13 Among the orientations transmitted by these multiple structures of domination was the idea of progress, rendered ambivalent, however, by its very association with Westernization. The third pattern of the idea of progress in the Third World, that of defensive modernization, occurred in a small number of Afro-Asian states where, through a combination of diplomacy, strength, and good fortune, Western conquest was averted. The globalizing thrust of Western imperialism became evident by the second half of the nineteenth century. The more perspicacious could identify the sources of this thrust in the knowledge and power attributable to the material engines of progress: science, technology, and industry. Most important of all was power; in the first instance, monarchs such as Menelik of Ethiopia and Mongkut of Thailand needed to gain access to military technology. More broadly, an understanding of Western modes of thought facilitated the diplomatic ingenuity required to deflect the conquerers; Thailand first employed foreigners as drillmasters and advisers to the foreign ministry. 14 Sheer military force also helped; Ethiopian survival was assured by Menelik's defeat of several thousand Italians in 1896, and the martial prowess of Pathan warriors made occupation of Afghanistan simply too costly for Britain. Success in defensive modernization required opening the gates wide enough to allow the idea of progress in. The first to develop this craft was Peter the Great in seventeenth-century Russia, when a technology gap was beginning to become perceptible. By the nineteenth century, the chasm was wider, and extensive if selective adaptation was indispensable. Students were dispatched to Europe, and some foreign personnel were retained by the state. The artifacts of Western industry were admitted in deference to the insistence by European emissaries 13. For a useful discussion of these themes, see James S. Coleman, ed., Education and Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965). 14. See David J. Steinberg, ed., In Search of Southeast Asia ( N e w York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 114-16. King Mongkut and his chief minister, Suriyaivong, are described as coping with an ominous set of British demands in 1855 by plying the English envoy with cigars and wine while "casually revealing detailed acquaintance with European economic theory and the principles of good government."

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on the virtues of trade as the hallmark of civilization. While those directing the defensive modernization process were skeptical about the intrinsic virtues of the West or the happiness that might flow from selective Westernization, they were persuaded that the knowledge and power available in the West constituted not only ameliorative change but was essential for survival. T h e most remarkable example of defensive modernization is Japan. Elements of Japanese success are evidently rooted in its history and culture: an unusually homogeneous society amenable to purposive collective action and relatively well endowed with a literate class. These sturdy strands of cultural material, however, were not woven into a conscious creed of modernization until the threat of uncontrollable Western intrusion loomed menacingly by the 1850s. T h e Japanese response is commonly dated with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, bringing in its train sweeping political and social transformations that released the country's energies for a deliberate modernization program. Japan thus organized itself to deflect Western economic and political expansion from its shores; more than any other defensive modernizer, Japan was able to determine the cultural terms of its model of progress. Western technology was massively assimilated, but the social impact of industrialization was mediated through the unchallenged primacy of the Japanese cultural heritage. Even the disaster of World War II and the American political (though not economic) occupation which followed did not subvert the Japanese synthesis of material progress and cultural heritage. Indeed, shorn of militarism, Japanese capitalism entered a period of unprecedented dynamism in the postwar period, which opened the extraordinary possibility that this Asian nation might in the next century become the world's premier industrial power. Perhaps because the Japanese pathway is so thoroughly grounded in its own cultural heritage, its contribution to the Third World vision of progress has been limited; few southern hemisphere statesmen make pilgrimages to examine the Japanese experience. One may doubt whether the defensive modernization strategy is easily available to those whose political, economic, and cultural strategies are more heavily impacted by the Western imperial era. The process of transmission of the idea of progress to the Third World was affected by gradually altering perceptions in the Western world. When imperial expansion began in the fifteenth century, there was not a marked disparity in material technology between Europe and the rest of the world. T h e most important distinction to the first mariners who sailed the uncharted seas was between Christian and "heathen." However, concepts of racial arrogance began to gather force, to come into full flower, in the nineteenth century. 15 As colonial 15. T h e process is well chronicled by Philip D. Curtin, The (Madison: University of W i s c o n s i n Press, 1 9 6 4 ) .

Image

of

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conquest reached flood tide, the assumption of Western superiority— the nether side of the idea of progress—was scarcely open to question in Europe. Colonial expansion had to be justified primarily to domestic opinion, some of which required persuasion that the "white man's burden" really was profitable to the metropole. In return for the new markets, raw materials, and national aggrandizement presumed to accrue to colonizers, the conquerer offered the blessings of progress in the form of what was usually termed "civilization." In the political field, this meant a minimalist administrative apparatus, which applied the "principles of good government," translated as enforcement of hegemony of the colonial state, a rudimentary legal apparatus, and fiscal machinery to support this structure. For areas not preempted by a universal religion, Christian evangelization was seen as a necessary condition of uplift. Trade with European mercantile houses was widely believed to have powerful redeeming impact. 16 The higher purposes of mankind were served by the mise en valeur of the natural resources of the colonies. These materials otherwise lay idle, as the colonized lacked the capacity to exploit them. As a disinterested service to humanity, mise en valeur created the infrastructure of a modern economy for the colonized and made the raw materials available for Western industry. This doctrine was elaborated into a high-minded creed of colonial progress by Lord Lugard in his "dual mandate": tutelage in good government and exploitation in trusteeship of natural resources. Lugard took the gathering protest against imperial rule as validation of its mission: "If there is unrest and a desire for independence, as in India and Egypt, it is because we have taught the people the value of liberty and freedom, which for centuries these peoples had not known. Their very discontent is a measure of their progress." 17 However, the notion of the mission civilisatrice as an eleemosynary charter of progress would not long be so comfortably rationalized. In its waning years, colonialism required a much more elaborated defense. The gathering force of Asian and African anticolonial nationalism and the slowly eroding self-confidence in the West on the legitimacy of domination called for a more active commitment to progress. Gradually, the concept of progress as mise en valeur and mission civilisatrice was superseded by the goal of "colonial development." This doctrine pledged state-directed economic change accompanied by social policies deemed to assure advancement of the subject population. In Africa, more or less conscious definitions of educational policies were first devised in the 1920s. In 1940, Britain enacted a Colonial 16. Some missionaries, however, viewed traders as a depraved lot from w h o m their charges should be isolated; see Barbara A. Yates, The Missions and Educational Development in Belgian Africa 1876-1908, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1967. 17. Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: W. Blockwood & Sons, 1922), p. 618.

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Development and Welfare Act; in the authoritative words of Lord Hailey, "a new concept... had come to be increasingly accepted . . . namely, that active State intervention was a necessary lever to the amelioration of social conditions. The aim of good Colonial administration thus came to be defined positively as the promotion of economic and social advance in order to provide the essential basis for political self-rule." 18 In the postwar period, with Asia independent or in armed revolt, other colonizers hastened to follow suit actively to promote socioeconomic uplift in their remaining dependent territories; Belgium launched a well-publicized ten-year plan for public investment in 1950, and France established a Fund for Economic and Social Development (FIDES) in 1946. Until the late 1950s, however, "development" was intended by Belgium and France as an alternative to the nationalist goal of independence. The efficiency of the European colonial mandarinate and the superior resources of the metropole were held to guarantee swifter and safer progress than the adventure of self-rule. The era of defensive colonialism in Africa coincided with a period of rapidly expanding state revenues fueled by the postwar commodity boom, which ran out of steam only in 1955. The political urgency of these development expenditures and swelling resources available to the colonial state, abetted by relatively modest supplements from the metropolitan treasury, did give real content to the welfare pretensions of terminal colonialism. Formerly skeletal educational and health systems were pushed out into the rural periphery. Roads and water supplies appeared in response to the swelling cry for "amenities." A wide battery of technical services—agricultural, veterinary, sanitation —were added to the older law-and-order infrastructure of regional administration. The postwar metamorphosis of official dogmas of progress had a powerful impact in extending the sphere of state activity. At the same time, there was a curious paternalism to its legacy. Colonial apologetics always rested on the premise that the powerful were mandated by history to define the future for their subjects. The more comprehensive the colonially defined blueprints for social advancement became, the more pervasive was the paternalism which suffused its inner spirit. The agenda for amelioration was fixed by the state, perhaps abetted by mission partners. The superior wisdom of the state and risks of recourse to immature judgments of its subjects were effortless assumptions of the mandarinate. PROGRESS AND CULTURAL SELF-AFFIRMATION

The doctrine of progress in the Third World is, in a crucial sense, dialectical. If imperial transmission is thesis, then liberation struggle is antithesis. It is the fusion through struggle of these opposites that is 18. Lord Hailey, An Africa Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 203.

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the inner core of the creed. Nationalism took form as an ideology of liberation through an increasingly comprehensive critique of colonialism. In its earliest Third World form—the rejection of the absolutist peninisular bureaucracy of the Spanish royal house in early nineteenthcentury Latin America—the doctrine was a relatively simple and unadorned demand for local rule and the denunciation of mercantile and bureaucratic abuse. Neither nationalism nor anticolonialism had yet undergone much doctrinal development, and the adversary was only the relatively underdeveloped eighteenth-century colonial state. Twentieth-century Afro-Asian nationalism took form around the bedrock idea of the right to self-determination and the illegitimacy of foreign rule. The vexed question of what constitutes a "people," who are entitled to exercise this act of sovereign will, was resolved through ultimate acceptance of the imperial partition itself as generative of the human collectivities to claim their birthright. By degree, the arbitrary territorial units of partition claimed the sanctity of the modern nationstate. Thus we encounter such curious memorabilia as Ruben Um Nyobe's assertion that "God alone had created the Cameroon" (with Bismarck as silent partner), or the rococo claims of Cabinda separatists that their territory had been bound to Portugal by separate treaty and was thus not properly part of Angola. An estimated one hundred thousand perished in the forlorn struggle to sustain Timor as a territory whose identity derives from Portuguese occupation, and a bitter struggle by a suddenly coalescent Sahroui people was undertaken to avert partition between Morocco and Mauritania. As nationalism gained momentum, the negative valuation of colonialism and its works became total. Colonialism, conceived in force, born in blood, and matured in oppression, was seen as devoid of redeeming features. Fanon gave voice to these views: Colonialism generally manages, at the turning point when history and the nation reject it, to maintain itself as a value. It is not true that it was a good thing for France to have made of Algeria what it is today.... French colonialism will not be legitimized by the Algerian people. No spectacular undertaking will make us forget the legalized racism, the illiteracy, the flunkyism generated and maintained in the very depth of the consciousness of our people.... Instead of integrating colonialism, conceived as the birth of a new world, in Algerian history, we have made it an unhappy, execrable accident, the only meaning of which was to have inexcusably retarded the coherent evolution of the Algerian society and nation. 19 In its radical form, Afro-Asian nationalism thus refuted all of the claims of colonialism. The mission civilisatrice was cultural aggres19. Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 101.

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sion; the dual mandate was naked exploitation, and the welfare development program was a cynical fraud. Far from introducing ameliorative change, colonialism had retarded the "coherent evolution" of society. Rather than representing the farthest point of progress, the colonial powers embodied decadence and decay. "Most of the European nations," wrote Nehru, "are full of mutual hatreds and past conflicts and injustices." 2 0 True, not all anticolonial nationalism hinged upon the root-andbranch rejection of the imperial legacy. Leaders such as Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia and Leopold Senghor of Senegal made no secret of their admiration for French culture. Kwame Nkrumah, an uncompromising foe of imperialism, nonetheless spoke of the "vast, untapped reservoir of peace and goodwill toward Britain, would she but divest herself of the outmoded, moth-eaten trappings of two centuries ago, and present herself to her colonial peoples in a new and shining vestment of peace and love, and give us a guiding hand in working out our own destinies." 21 Nonetheless, the equation of liberation with progress was unequivocal for all. A particularly thorny aspect of the dialectic synthesis of the idea of progress was the treatment of the cultural heritage. Nationalist liberation is fundamentally an assertion of self that cannot be denied. At the same time, most nationalist leaders and intellectuals had passed through the portals of the essentially Western educational systems and had been profoundly influenced by Western philosophical discourse, particularly of the Left—liberalism, socialism, and Marxism. Their ideological programs for change were derived from these doctrines, yet a place for affirmation of self through cultural heritage was required. T h e discovery of India, for Nehru, yielded both "terrifying glimpses of dark corridors which seem to lead back to primeval night" and, at the same time, "a cultural unity amidst diversity . . . a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision . . . the fulness and warmth of the day about her." Change she must, yet her store of wisdom must be treasured. 22 Various symbolic reconstructions have been proposed, which both reject and incorporate the past. Senghor developed an elaborate cosmology, influenced by Father Teilhard de Chardin. 23 The ultimate triumph of human civilization would result from a cosmic fusion of world cultures at a future "omega point." T o prepare the ground, each 20. Jawaharlal N e h r u , Discovery 1 9 5 6 ) , p. 563. 21. K w a m e N k r u m a h , Ghana: Sons, 1 9 5 9 ) , p. 103.

of India

( 1 9 4 6 ; rpt. London: Meridian Books,

An Autobiography

(Edinburgh: T h o m a s N e l s o n &

22. Nehru, Discovery of India, pp. 578-79.

23. Chardin was himself an architect o f philosophic synthesis, much influenced by his prolonged i m m e r s i o n in Chinese culture.

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cultural heritage had to vitalize itself—in the African case, through the doctrine of négritude.24 Nkrumah used an appropriated myth of the past as warrant for the future by christening the reborn Gold Coast as "Ghana" even though this great medieval state did not geographically coincide with its contemporary namesake. "The name of Ghana," Nkrumah explained, is rooted deeply in ancient African history.... It kindles in the imagination of modern African youth the grandeur and the achievements of a great medieval civilization which our ancestors developed many centuries before European penetration.... It is reported that Egyptian, European, and Asiatic students attended the great and famous universities and other institutions of higher learning that flourished in Ghana during the medieval period to learn philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and law . . . we take pride in the name, not out of romanticism, but as an inspiration for the future.25 The cultural heritage invoked by Senghor and Nkrumah was carefully abstracted and detached from any concrete referents which would constrain the blueprints for advance. More specific legacies of the past, such as chiefs, were viewed by Nkrumah as a feudal execrescence blocking the path to change. The creed of "authenticity" put forward by Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire as national ideology similarly used the past while in effect rejecting its specific characteristics. Recourse to authenticity, Mobutu argued, was not to forsake modernity in favor of ancestral values but was rather a dynamic method of progress without alienation by asserting cultural heritage while pursuing material change. Mao Tse-tung went further in the specific repudiation of the Confucian heritage as a means to moral regeneration of the peasant mass. Progress, in its Marxist-Leninist vision, required that the age-old ethic of deference to extant social hierarchies be shattered. The organization of the "speak bitterness" campaign in the early 1950s was the catharsis. In being forced to externalize anger at landlord exploitation, the peasant was liberated from the stultifying ethic of submission and internalization of resentment which Confucian socialization had induced.26 Another radical synthesis, of growing significance in lands of Islamic heritage, was integralist Islam. This movement, embodied in different ways by Libyan leader Wanis Muammar al-Qadafi, Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Sudan, 24. Leopold Senghor, "What is Negritude?" reprinted in The Ideologies of the Developing Nations, ed. Paul E. Sigmund (New York: Praeger, 1963). 25. Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom (New York: Praeger, 1961), pp. 67-68. 26. See Richard Solomon, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

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demands a total severance of modernity from Westernization and its evil twin, secularism. Ameliorative change was taken to be possible, indeed necessary, in the delimited sphere of material life; however, such change was a poisoned gift if tied to the decadence and corruption of the West. Material progress was beneficent only if suffused with the just social order inspired by Islam. Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Muhammad Al-Ghazzali argued: "Everybody knows that capitalism is founded on robbery and, what is worse, that it spends all that it steals on the satisfaction of base desires and the spreading of moral, social, and political chaos." 2 7 Unless guided by Islam, progress in the form of secular materialism leads inexorably to the sort of pervasive corruption symbolized by the Pahlavi state in Iran. An Islamic socialism would permit harnessing new technological possibilities to social justice. Integralist Islam is a combative reassertion of faith and heritage; it ferociously rejects secularism, capitalism, Marxism, and reformist Islam. Yet it goes far beyond mere revivalism and theocracy. Whatever its prospects for survival, the Khomeini Islamic republic in Iran does not repudiate the idea of progress. Rather it seeks to absorb, dominate, and redefine it as handmaiden of a perfected religious order rather than as subverter of the faith. However, whether the Khomeini synthesis of integralist Islam and material progress is either economically or politically viable is quite another question. The patriarch of Iranian Shi'ism may will the end of prosperity in piety, but he also denies to the officially invested government the means rationally to pursue material goals. Although destruction of the Pahlavi state won applause from a broad spectrum of society, fervor for the new order of the integralist Islamic republic is much narrower. The struggle against social forces, both in the Iranian heartland and the non-Persian (and frequently non-Shi'a) periphery, which do not share the Khomeini vision of the righteous society, is likely to intensify. In this contest, enforcement of piety may well eclipse material progress. It is interesting to compare the fundamentalism of the Wahabi affiliation of the Saudi ruling house, or of a Qadafi, with the would-be Islamic republic of Khomeini. In the Sunni lands, such as Libya and Saudi Arabia, integral Islam is upheld by political leaders, whose fusion of material and religious goals has a different texture. In both these instances, the vast petroleum revenues are committed to sweeping modernization programs, as well as the promotion of religious causes at home and abroad. In Shi'ite Iran, the relatively structured religious hierarchy has assumed informal but no less direct political power, which gives theological goals more weight. Further, there is little real dissent from the fundamentalist religious philosophy promoted by the state in Libya and Saudi Arabia whereas in Iran the 27. Quoted in Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 239.

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currents of secularism in the center and cultural autonomy on the periphery flow strongly, forcing the religious leaders into bitter struggle to impose their views. In different ways, a common theme observable in the absorption of the idea of progress in the Third World was rejection of the premise that modernity was defined by Western values. "Progress" was not a seamless web, bound by cultural threads of European provenience. The ideology of the mission civilisatrice, central to colonial philosophy, was repudiated. The peculiarly coercive metaphors of Western analysis had imposed the image of the modern-traditional dichotomy. The alchemy of this figure of speech had rendered the non-Western cultural heritage as "traditional" and, therefore, ascriptive, static, and past-centered: the incarnation of antiprogress. To repatriate the idea of progress, some form of valorization of cultural heritage was requisite. Ameliorative change, therefore, was not contingent on self-alienation but was discovered through self-realization. Above all, the vision of progress that was universally accepted was material. The ethical superiority of Western civilization was dubious; the advance in Western science and technology, essential instruments for environmental mastery, was indisputable. Here we find an intriguing intersection with the transformation of the idea of progress in the West. Confidence in ameliorative change is largely unshaken in the scientific disciplines, where generally agreed standards of measurement exist. Doubt grows stronger as we enter the more incommensurable domains of arts and morals. Murray Krieger points out that technique and critique may have improved, but there is no certain basis for claiming that the intrinsic worth of poetry or painting is greater (see pp. 463ff.). Frederick Olafson is even more skeptical in treating the impact of progress on ethics, suggesting that it tends to function as a justificatory ideology that really dispenses with independent ethical criteria (see pp. 526ff.). PROGRESS AS DEVELOPMENT

Thus, if we return to the Keohane formulation, we may suggest that the idea of progress as assimilated in Third World thought gives full credence to the knowledge and power components. The enormous investment in educational systems, which consumes a quarter of many Third World budgets, is eloquent demonstration of this point. Even more firmly rooted is the conviction that increasing knowledge— material science—is convertible into greater power over environment; armed with technology, the state can wrest abundance from a reluctant nature. This granite axiom is the foundation for the ubiquitous development plans which articulate the dream of progress. However, the association of accelerating Western material advance with cumulating virtue is as dubious to the Third World as it is to the Western postmaterialists identified by Samuel Barnes (see pp. 4l5ff.) and

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Ronald Inglehart. The most immediate Third World experience of the West was through conquest and exploitation, made possible precisely by the surge of postmedieval knowledge and power. The Western claim to superior "civilization" was daily belied by observed imperial behavior: racism and oppression. Most doubtful of all, in West and non-West, is that higher orders of satisfaction and happiness spill over from Western material progress. Here divergent reasoning leads to a common conclusion. For the affluent, "postmaterialists," the new order of material security made possible by the first two dimensions of progress leads to new dissatisfactions arising from an increasing preoccupation with the aesthetic and moral components of life either untouched by or actually threatened by material advance. In the Third World, the postmaterialist generation has yet to emerge, but there is a general conviction that permitting Western cultural values to migrate with science and technology is a fatal prescription for massive alienation. Although only the material aspects of the idea of progress were embraced, at the hour of its greatest achievements, in the 1950s and 1960s, Third World nationalism exhibited a mood of exhilarating confidence in their efficacy. The political triumph over imperialism— bitter and bloody in Indochina and Algeria, almost effortless in a number of former African and Asian colonial domains—built a mood of expectation, of exuberance which eroded in the 1970s. The stunning defeats of Western powers once believed invincible in the military domain contributed powerfully to this triumphal mood. Vietnam held at bay first the French, then American expeditionary forces armed with overwhelming firepower. Outmanned and underequipped Algerian guerrillas, at the cost of a million deaths, shattered the centennial myth of Algérie française. Egypt bearded imperialism by seizing and efficiently operating the Suez Canal, winning through diplomacy what was lost on the battlefield to Britain, France, and Israel. Fidel Castro and his small band of guerrillas in the Sierra Maestre provoked the collapse of a corrupted citadel of imperialism ninety miles from the Florida shores. These victories in the political realm at the time seemed easily translatable into economic transformation. "Seek ye first the political kingdom," went the oft-quoted Nkrumah aphorism, "and all else shall be added unto you." Such sentiments are echoed in the ebullient mood revealed in Nasser's Philosophy of the Revolution,29 At the extreme, this might be manifest in declarations of faith in the romanticism of revolutionary transformation expressed by Sukarno, who declared, "I 28. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). 29. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Philosophy of the Revolution (Cairo: Information Department, 1954).

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am inspired by it, I am fascinated by it, I am completely absorbed by it, I am crazed, I am obsessed by the Romanticism of Revolution." 30 There was much to support this optimistic vision of progress within reach. Western social science was in a positivist mood, with development and modernization theory in the ascendant. Economic growth theory brought the good tidings of the Rostowian "takeoff." The Soviet experience appeared to demonstrate the capacity of the state, through socialist planning, to transform a backward society within the time span of a few five-year plans. Even more inspiring was the example of the Chinese revolution, which—before its post-Mao heirs confessed its technological flaws—seemed to demonstrate an egalitarian escape route from famine and poverty within a generation by the marriage of nationalism and socialist revolution. Progress, then, as a possible dream, is an inspirational theme in the political testaments of the towering figures of this era—Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, Nyerere, Castro. In more bureaucratic prose, the vision is inscribed in the early five-year plans of the new states. The ideological panoply was broad, but the center of gravity was radical and populist, often socialist. Liberation, cultural resurgence, science, and technology: these are the core dimensions of the idea of progress in the Third World. Of crucial importance in the universal diffusion of this concept is the existence of a reference point in the First and Second worlds. Here the contrast with the ambiguities of progress in the West is fundamental. Aron points to the paradox of moral disorientation in Western societies in the face of a material success never before imagined. Societies, he argues, do not measure themselves against their past but against their ambitions for the future. 31 We would amend this observation by noting that the future, for advanced industrial societies, is an uncharted sea. For the Third World, the standard of measurement is advanced industrial society itself, with its unparalleled abundance. If we assume that growing segments of First (and presumably Second) World societies have assurance of a satisfactory level of material security, then the future agenda for amelioration lies in the problematic domain of spiritual, psychic, and moral fulfillment. For the Third World, the agenda of progress is starkly clear: to match the material accomplishments of the first two worlds. This elemental fact explains why an idea of progress is both so universal and so material: the extension to the Third World of the concept of "catching up with the United States" cited by Moses Abramovitz (see pp. .260-61). The very existence of the empirical referent serves to override doubts as to whether "progress" is attainable or good.

30. Sukarno, Independence Day speech, August 17, I960. 31. Aron, Les désillusions du progrès, pp. vii-xxiii, 333.

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W e may detect here an echo of the Condorcet vision cited by Keohane, that human progress in Africa and Asia "is likely to be more rapid and certain than our own because they can receive from us everything that we have had to find out for ourselves." Joined to this was the equally comforting Condorcet assumption that all good things go together; progress could be comprehensive and not a series of anguishing trade-offs. In this perspective, we can also understand why the "limits to growth" debate in the West has so little resonance in the Third World, why a Brazilian delegate to the 1972 Stockholm conference on global environmental problems could invite the developed world to "send us your pollution," 3 2 why the extensive clearing of the Amazonian forest for development could provoke concern in the West but not in Brazil. Another salient divergence between Western and non-Western concepts of progress derives from the differential psychological impact of three calamities that shook the self-confidence of the West. World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, all within three decades, in their colossal human destruction, ended the serene optimism of 1913. Though the prolonged period of rapid Western growth after World War II partly restored the faith, it jostled with Orwellian images of the ultimate destiny of modern society and postmaterialistic disillusionments. The Third World was affected by these events; huge numbers of colonial soldiers were conscripted to help fight the world wars (ninety-two Senegalese batallions fought on the Western front in World War I), and Third World producers suffered a devastating loss of income through collapse of primary commodity markets in 1930. But the Third World clearly bore no responsibility for the horrors of the holocaust at Hiroshima, for economic crises which threw millions into the breadlines, or for the implausible carnage of the two wars. PROGRESS AS PROBLEMATIC: T H E RISE OF DISILLUSION

Still, the optimism of an earlier decade relative to the ease of attainment of progress has eroded on a broad front. Models of growth and transformation which once seemed alluring have lost their luster. Many have come to believe that only sternly authoritarian regimes can provide guidance to the promised land of plenty, but the bankruptcy of many of these illuminates their potential costs. Diverse limitations of the nation-state itself have become more apparent, and the possibility of large-scale regression is now clear. Many signs bear witness to the new mood of pessimism for Africa: French radical agronomist René Dumont first gave voice to doubts as to the direction of change in 32. Charles W. Anderson, Fred R. von der Mehden, and Crawford Young, Issues of Political Development, rev. ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. viii.

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L'Afrique Noire est mal par tie, soon followed by the more despairing L'Afrique peut-elle partir? of Albert Meister. The sense of progressive nationalist mission in Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood gives way to the biting social criticism of his film Xala\ James Ngugi of Kenya follows the same trajectory from Weep Not, Child to Petals of Blood. Ayi Kwei Armah conveys the disillusionments of independence in the feculent imagery of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Robert Heilbroner carries the mood of gloom to its farthest point, concluding, "the answer to whether we can conceive of the future other than as a continuation of the darkness, cruelty, and disorder of the past seems to me to be no; and to the question of whether worse impends, yes."33 In the 1970s, the models of growth which had once offered inspiration evaporated one by one. The "takeoff" models of growth on Western lines, although they had some successes (Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Taiwan), often yielded massive corruption and gigantic misallocations (Iran) or accentuated inequality (Brazil). The intellectual prestige of socialism remained high, and indeed a new wave of Third World Marxist-Leninist states appeared in the 1970s (Afghanistan, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Congo-Brazzaville, Benin, among others). As Alfred Meyer notes, these leaders—as often military officers as professional revolutionaries—"proclaim themselves the enlightened vanguard of the exploited, in the name of which they establish their dictatorships." Although they claim to be building the economic base for socialism in societies where fully developed capitalism does not yet exist, yet the very absence today of an authoritative world communist center, as Kenneth Jowitt observes, permits "self-designated 'scientific socialist' African elites to avoid the hard identity choice of bloc alignment internationally and exclusive political choices domestically."34 Indeed, the concrete designs for progress through socialist transformation had lost their luster. Long vanished was the kind of admiration once felt for Soviet achievements by Nehru, who spoke of "the tremendous educational and cultural achievements of the masses," the Russians as "almost wholly devoid of racism," while "no other country today presents such a politically solid and economically well-balanced 33. René Dumont, L'Afrique Noire es malpartie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962); Albert Meister, L'Afrique peut-elle partir? (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966); Ousmane Sembene, God's Bits of Wood (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962); James Ngugi, Weep Not Child (London: Heinemann, 1964), and Petals of Blood (New York: Dutton, 1978); Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1968); Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 22. 34. Kenneth Jowitt, in Carl G. Rosberg and Thomas M. Callaghy, Socialism in SubSaharan Africa (Berkeley: University of California Institute of International Studies, 1979), p. 144.

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picture. ' 3 5 T h e Chinese model, which admittedly attracted more often devotional praise than the truer flattery of imitation, was tarnished by the confessions of material flaws which followed Mao's death, as well as the unseemly alliance in which the People's Republic was discovered in the struggle against the social imperialism of "the new czars." Cuba won widespread respect for its political feat of building a socialist society in the face of unrelenting American hostility, with imposing achievements in the social welfare field. While the prestige yielded by these accomplishments gave Cuba a weight in Third World councils which belied its modest size, the heavy reliance upon Soviet aid and its economic stagnation devalued the model. 36 Vietnam, inspirational in its military struggle against colonialism and imperialism, was tarnished in triumph by the tawdry ransoming of the Sino-Vietnamese populace, its subimperialism in Cambodia and Laos, the blockages of the socialist economy in the South, and the revelation of a Vietnamese Gulag with as many as eight hundred thousand prisoners. 37 Beyond the Marxist family of states, once-prestigious experiments in socialist construction—Velasco's Peru, Nasser's Egypt, Nyerere's Tanzania—encountered serious setbacks. Third World socialism had become an idea without a model. In Latin America, confidence in the idea of progress was also jolted by the sudden end in the 1960s of what had appeared to be a powerful if not irresistible trend toward democracy in the 1950s, the demise of old dictatorships. It was precisely in the most economically advanced Latin American states where a new form of polity emerged, well labeled by Guillermo O'Donnell as "the bureaucratic-authoritarian state." 3 8 T h e social mobilization of the "popular sectors" produced by modernization generates pressures, O'Donnell argues, which can be contained in a capitalist framework only by the erection of a militarybureaucratic leviathan state disposed to silence dissent and demobilize restive lower strata by terror. On the other end of the political spectrum, a small band of K h m e r Rouge cadres under Pol Pot tried to compensate for their weakness by a sanguinary reign of terror and brutality which has few historical parallels; it was their apparent logic that only through ruthless destruction of the old society could a new socialist order be securely erected. T h e natural course of Third World modernization exhibited certain disconcerting pathologies, which no one seemed able to control. Urban growth in many areas sped forward at 7 - 1 0 percent per year, yielding sprawling cities which could supply neither employment nor basic 35. Nehru, Discovery of India, pp. 556, 563. 36. The most thorough and balanced recent assessment of the Cuban revolution is Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978). 37. Le Monde, October 5, 1978. 38. Guillermo O'Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (Berkeley: University of California Institute of International Studies, 1973).

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services to the new immigrants. Projections suggest that by the turn of the century Mexico City will have thirty million, and Lagos ten million—creating social problems no level of oil revenue can resolve. Education was, in many countries, a quantitative success but a qualitative failure; the mood reflected in a series of conferences in the 1970s on the theme "education and development" was one of disenchantment. T h e system failed to impart the technological skills presumed central to progress but generated instead a rural exodus—and, to more extreme critics, alienation, Western consumption expectations, and a ruinous financial drain. Benoit Verhaegen, arguing in the Zaire case that the educational system has been in fact destructive of progress and development, cites the fact that the city of Kisangani houses today 650 university graduates, or ten times as many as during the colonial era. Y e t the level of economic activity is much lower, and the forty-five managerial cadres of the only significant productive enterprise in town, a French textile factory, are almost all European. "Far from being the essential condition for autonomous development," Verhaegen concludes, "an increase in national university graduates would seem to be the indicator of stagnation and dependency." 59 Further, headway has been disappointingly slow, particularly in the poorest set of "Fourth World" countries. Debts, which became a widespread problem in the 1970s, became an intolerable burden for a growing number of countries (Brazil, Turkey, Sudan, Zaire, Zambia, Sierra Leone, among others). Rural development lagged, and many countries with the potential for food surpluses found it necessary to import basic foodstuffs. Not only had material progress fallen short of expectations, but in a number of countries absolute stagnation, or even substantial declines in well-being have occurred. In Burma, by 1961 the per capita gross national product was only 86 percent of that for the late 1930s, and the figure has further declined since. 40 Spiro, in his inquiry in rural and urban Burma in 1961, found that his interlocutors expressed terrible disappointment with their present fate: Post-independence Burma has been characterized . . . by political and economic disaster, even aside from the military coup and its calamitous aftermath . . . the history of post-independence Burmese economy has been one of industrial failure and agricultural stagnation.... 39. The observation gains in poignancy when one realizes the author has devoted his entire career to university development in Zaire. Benoit Verhaegen, "Universities, Social Classes, and Economic Dependency," conference on the African university and development, Bellagio, Italy, August 1978. See also Benoit Verhaegen, L'enseignement universitaire au Zaire (Paris: Edition L'Harmattan, 1978). 40. See Lawrence D. Stifel, "Economics of the Burmese Way of Socialism," Asian Survey, 11(8) (August 1971): 803-17; Josef Silverstein, Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977).

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T h e result has been disillusionment and humiliation. One cannot talk very long with Burmese of any stratum without realizing the depth of their bitterness and frustration. These feelings are especially intense, however, in the upper stratum. As many of them expressed it to me, while the rest of the world—by which, of course, they mean the Western world—has undergone vast economic and technological changes, Burma has stood still. Everything seems hopeless to them; their high dreams have turned into nightmares. . . . 41 In Uganda, production of all marketed commodities has radically declined under the profoundly destructive "state of blood" created by Amin. 42 In Ghana, the calamitous ravages of hyperinflation and shortages in the face of sustained record prices for the major export, cocoa, are explicable only when one appreciates the enormity of the predatory diversion of resources by the military clique from 1972-1979. 4 3 The wave of executions of senior military officers in 1979 in a country so little used to political killing finds its logic in the generalized sense of accelerating deprivation. In Zaire, the government trade union issued figures in 1976 demonstrating that urban real wages had dropped to 26 percent of their I 9 6 0 level; with 80 percent inflation the following two years, and one 30 percent wage increase, by 1978 the figure was little more than 10 percent. 44 Y e t all of these countries have the resources for modest prosperity and reasonable material progress. Nor were these isolated instances; International Labor Organization figures showed in eleven of twenty-one African countries surveyed, the real minimum wage declined between 1963 and 1974. 45 A recent survey in rural Haiti found that there was a widespread conviction among peasants that life was steadily deteriorating and that the only real solution was emigration. 46 In a number of Third World countries, a crisis of the state itself appeared at hand. While the Iranian revolution of 1978 was an event of far-reaching significance, an alternative formula to the discredited Pahlavi state has yet to emerge. T h e experiment in Marxist-Leninist rule in Afghanistan is disintegrating. T h e final demolition of the Amin regime by the Tanzanian army left Ugandan leaders with a 41. Spiro, Buddhism and Society, p. 183. 42. So named by one of his former ministers, Henry Kyemba, A State of Blood (New York: Ace Books, 1977). 43. For figures, see Crawford Young, "The State and the Small Urban Center," in Aidan Southall, ed., Small Urban Centers and Rural Development in Africa (Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, 1979), pp. 313-33. 44. Crawford Young, "Zaire: The Unending Crisis," Foreign Affairs, 5 7 ( 1 ) (October 1978): 169-85. 45. Susumu Watanabe, "Minimum Wages in Developing Countries: Myth and Reality," International Labour Review, 113 (May-June 1976): 353. 46. Personal communication, former American Consular officer, Port-au-Prince. For evidence that their perception is correct, see Rotberg, Haiti.

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shattered state and an economy and a society in disarray. Chad, perennial problem state, finds its political forces so fragmented by thirteen years of civil war that survival has become problematic. T h e viability of Mauritania has been placed in doubt by the unwise adventure of sharing in the partition of former Spanish Sahara with Morocco, exposing the country to a guerrilla challenge which has dangerously weakened the fabric of the state. Thus, the range of possible outcomes in the pursuit of progress must be extended to include not only results which fall short of the hopes implicit in the idea but absolute regression and even total decomposition. Y e t the idea of progress remains a powerful beacon, at least so far. While the earlier conviction of inevitable success has proven naive, neither is failure predetermined. Hollis Chenery has entered a convincing brief (see pp. 319ff.) for the possibility of material progress in the best sense, encompassing both growth and redistribution. 47 A fairly broad spectrum of countries, discounting the O P E C set which have experienced windfall gains, have enjoyed at least partial success. However cogent Patterson's critique of "the iniquitous distribution and exploitation of the world's resources" and "a failure of i n t e l l e c t . . . of the social sciences," 4 8 progress is a possible dream in the Third World, as elsewhere, at least in the material realm. And the hope embodied in its message is surely an indispensable spur to the political will and wisdom necessary for its realization. 47. See Hollis Chenery et al., Redistribution with Growth (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). 48. Patterson, "Transformation of the Idea of Progress," p. 3.

5 The Evolutionary Concept of Progress FRANCISCO

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Progress presents itself as an obvious attribute of the evolutionary process. T h e earliest organisms were no more complex than today's bacteria. Three billion years later, their descendants include orchids, bees, dolphins, and human beings, which appear to be, prima facie at least, patently more advanced or progressive than their primitive ancestors. But what do we mean when we say that there has been progress in the evolutionary process? Organisms may be progressive with respect to one or a few attributes, regressive with respect to others. For example, bacteria are able to synthesize all their components and obtain the energy they need for living from inorganic compounds; human beings depend on other organisms. And some evolutionary lineages do not appear to be progressive by any reasonable definition: living bacteria are not very different from their ancestors of two or three billion years earlier. Moreover, many evolutionary lineages have become extinct. Nevertheless, some form of progress appears to have occurred in biological evolution as the result of a natural process. Hence, it seems worthwhile to investigate the notion of progress as this may have occurred in the biological world. Such investigation might yield a notion of progress applicable to other domains and, perhaps, of general validity. CHANGE, EVOLUTION, DIRECTION, AND PROGRESS

T h e notion that living organisms can be classified in a hierarchy going from lower to higher forms goes back to Aristotle and, indeed, even to 106

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earlier times: the creation of the world as described in Genesis contains the explicit notion that some organisms are higher than others and implies that living things can be arranged in a sequence from the lowest to the highest, which is man. The Bible's narrative of the creation reflects the common-sense impression that earthworms are lower than fish or birds, the latter lower than man. The idea of a "ladder of life" rising from amoeba to man is present, explicitly or implicitly, in all preevolutionary biology. The theory of evolution adds the dimension of time, or history, to the hierarchical classification of living things. The transition from bacteria to humans can now be seen as a natural, progressive development through time from simple to gradually more complex organisms. The expansion and diversification of life can also be judged as progress; some form of advance seems obvious in the transition from one or only a few kinds of living things to the more than two million different species living today. It is not immediately clear, however, what is meant by statements such as, "The evolution of organisms is progressive," or "Progress has occurred in the evolutionary sequence leading from bacteria to humans." Such expressions may simply mean that evolutionary sequences have a time direction or, even more simply, that they are accompanied by change. The term "progress" may be clarified by comparing it with other related terms used in biological discourse. These terms are "change," "evolution," and "direction." "Change" means alteration whether in the position, the state, or the nature of a thing. Progress implies change but not vice versa; not all changes are progressive. The molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in the air of a room are continuously changing positions; such change would not generally be regarded as progressive. The mutation of a gene from a functional allelic state to a nonfunctional one is a change but definitely not a progressive one. The terms "evolution" and "progress" can also be distinguished although both imply that sustained change has occurred. Evolutionary change is not necessarily progressive. The evolution of a species may lead to its own extinction, a change which is not progressive, at least not for that species. And some living organisms, such as bacteria or horseshoe crabs, do not seem to be significantly different from their ancestors of millions of generations ago. "Direction" and "progress" are different concepts as well. The concept of "direction" implies that a series of changes have occurred that can be arranged in a linear sequence with respect to some property or feature, such that elements in the later part of the sequence are more different from early elements of the sequence than from intermediate elements. Directional change may be "uniform" or not, depending on whether every member of the sequence is invariably more different from the first than each preceding member, or whether directional

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change occurs only on the average. (This distinction will also be made later with respect to progress.) If the elements in the sequence are plotted in a two-dimensional graph with time on one axis and some property or feature of the elements of the sequence on the other axis, and all the elements are connected by a line, directional change is uniform when the slope of that line is at every point positive (or at every point negative). The line connecting all the elements in the sequence may be straight or curved but should go up or down monotonically. Nonuniform or "net" (see below) directional change occurs when the line connecting all the elements in the sequence does not change monotonically but only on the average. Some elements in the sequence may represent a change of direction with respect to the immediately previous elements, but, on the average, later elements in the sequence aré further displaced than earlier ones. In discussions of evolution, "directionality" is sometimes equated with "irreversibility": the process of evolution is said to have a direction because it is irreversible. Biological evolution is irreversible (except perhaps in some trivial sense, as when a previously mutated gene mutates back to its former allelic state). Direction, however, implies more than irreversibility. Consider a new pack of cards with each suit arranged from ace to ten, knave, queen, king, and with the suits arranged in the sequence spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds. If we shuffle the cards thoroughly, the order of the cards will change, and the changes cannot be reversed by reshuffling. W e may shuffle again and again until the cards are totally worn out, without ever restoring the original sequence. The change of order in the pack of cards is irreversible but not directional. Irreversible and directional changes both occur in the inorganic as well as in the organic world. T h e second law of thermodynamics, which applies to all processes in nature, describes sequential changes that are irreversible but are also directional and, indeed, uniformly directional. Within a closed system, entropy always increases; that is, a closed system passes continuously from less to more probable states. The concept of direction applies to what in paleontology are called "evolutionary trends." A trend occurs in a phylogenetic sequence when a feature persistently changes through time in the members of the sequence. Trends are common occurrences in all fossil sequences sufficiently long to be called "sustained." 1 The difference between "direction" and "progress" can be explained by the following example. Consider the trend in the evolutionary sequence from fish to man toward a gradual reduction of the number of dermal bones in the skull roof or the trend toward increased molarization of the last premolars which occurred in the phylogeny of the Equidae from early Eocene ( H y r a c o t h e r i u m ) to early Oligocene ( H a p 1. G.G. Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), pp. 245-65.

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lohippus). These trends represent directional change, but it is not obvious that they should be labeled progressive. To label them progressive, we would need to agree that the directional change had been in some sense for the better. That is, in order to consider a directional sequence progressive, we need to add an evaluation, namely, that the condition in the latter members of the sequence represents, according to some standard, a melioration or improvement. The directionality of a sequence may be recognized and accepted without any such evaluation being added. Progress implies directional change, but the opposite is not true. THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS

Evolution, direction, and progress all imply that there is a historical sequence of events that exhibits a systematic alteration of a property or state of the elements in the sequence. Progress occurs when there is directional change toward a better state or condition. The concept of progress, then, contains two elements: one descriptive—that directional change has taken place, the other axiological—that the change represents an improvement or melioration.2 The notion of progress requires that a value judgment be made about what is better and what is worse according to some axiological standard. However, contrary to the belief of some authors,3 the axiological standard of reference need not be a moral one. Moral progress is possible, but not all forms of progress are moral. The evaluation required for progress is one of better versus worse or of higher versus lower but not necessarily one of right versus wrong or of good versus evil. "Better" may simply mean more efficient, more abundant, or more complex without connotating any reference to moral values or standards. Progress, then, may be defined as systematic change in a feature belonging to all the members of a sequence in such a way that posterior members of the sequence exhibit an improvement of that feature. More simply, progress may be defined as directional change toward the better. The antonym of progress is "regress." Regress or retrogression is directional change for the worse. The two elements of the definition, namely, directional change and improvement according to some standard, are jointly necessary and sufficient for the occurrence of progress. Directional change (and progress) may be observed in sequences that are spatially rather than temporally ordered. Biologists use the term "cline" to describe changes associated with geographical displacement, for example, a gradual increase in individual size with increasing latitude. Clines are examples of directional change recog2. T.A. Goudge, The Ascent of Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961). 3. For example, M. Ginsberg, Moral Progress, Frazer Lecture at the University of Glasgow (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1944); and R.C. Lewontin, "The Concept of Evolution," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 5, ed. D.L. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968).

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nized along a spatial dimension. In evolutionary discourse, however, temporal (historical) sequences are of greatest interest. The concept of progress just elucidated may be applied to all sorts of sequences and not only to biological ones. The historical development of a human culture (or of mankind as a whole) may be labeled progressive only if sustained (directional) change has occurred and if the change represents an improvement or amelioration. However, progress need not have occurred with respect to all the component elements of that culture (see below the distinction between "general progress" and "particular progress"). The definition proposed above makes it possible to identify in a historical sequence cultural aspects or components according to which progress may have occurred whereas no progress (or retrogression) may have occurred with respect to other aspects or components. Some discussions of human history fail to recognize this possibility. The claim that progress took place in a given historical period is sometimes negated by advancing the counterclaim that with respect to certain feature(s), the historical development was regressive. Appropriate identification of the feature or features according to which progress is predicated from the historical sequence may help to resolve such arguments. Of course, the possibility is not excluded of claiming that progress has taken place, for example, "with respect to a majority of features," or "with respect to those features that are most significant for human welfare," or the like. But claims such as these will require additional value judgments. The distinction between temporal and spatial sequences, made for the biological world, may be applied to human societies as well. It might be claimed, for example, that one society is more progressive than another contemporary society with respect to certain cultural elements. However, in cultural anthropology and history, as in biological evolution, temporal sequences are often more relevant than spatial ones. KINDS OF PROGRESS

The concept of progress may be further clarified by distinguishing various kinds of progress that are established by considering one or the other of the two essential elements of the definition. I shall later refer to different types of progress based on different axiological standards of reference. Now, I shall make two distinctions that relate to the descriptive element of the definition, namely, the requirement of directional change. These distinctions also apply, therefore, to the concept of direction. If we attend to the continuity of the direction of change, we can distinguish two kinds of progress: uniform and net. Uniform progress takes place whenever every later member of the sequence is better than every earlier member of the sequence according to a certain feature. Let m i represent the members of a sequence, temporarily ordered from 1 to n, and let pi measure the state of the feature under evalu-

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ation. There is uniform progress if it is the case for every m i and m~ that p. > pi for every j > i. Net progress does not require that every member of the sequence be better than all previous members of the sequence and worse than all its successors; it requires only that later members of the sequence be better on the average than earlier members. Net progress allows for temporary fluctuations of value. Formally, if the members of a sequence, m j are linearly arranged over time, net progress occurs whenever the regression (in the sense used in mathematical statistics) of p on time is significantly positive. Some authors have argued that progress has not occurred in evolution (or in human history) because no matter what standard is chosen, fluctuations of value are always found to have occurred. This criticism is valid against the occurrence of uniform but not net evolutionary progress. Also, neither uniform nor net progress requires that progress continue forever or that any specified goal be achieved. The rate of progress may decrease with time; progress requires only a gradual improvement in the members of the sequence. It is possible that a progressive sequence may tend asymptotically toward a finite goal, that is, continuously approach but never reach the goal. The distinction between uniform and net progress is similar but not identical to the distinction proposed between uniform and perpetual progress by C.D. Broad and T.A. Goudge. 4 Perpetual progress, as defined by Broad, requires that the maxima of value increase and that the minima do not decrease with time. Using the symbols given above, Broad's perpetual progress requires that for every m i there is at least one m-j ( j > i ) such that pj >pp and that there is at least one mk (k